“The ‘Enseñada’?” said Harper.
“Si, señor!” said Rosendo, with a little gesture which was very expressive.
Harper pulled at the wheel, and Appleby saw that he was addressing him.
“There are two of their gunboats on this coast, and it’s quite in the usual course that it’s the one I don’t want to see that turns up,” he said. “Her commander has a little grievance against me.”
Appleby did not ask him what it was. He had something else to think of, and the swift upward lurches and wisps of spray that blew about the “Ventura” made conversation difficult. The seas also seemed to be growing steeper as she closed with the land, and washed in as they went smoking past. Still, but for that sinister shape steadily rising higher on one quarter he could have found pleasure in the scene. The wail of wind, the humming of the shrouds, patter of spray, and roar of frothy seas stirred the blood in him, while the swift reeling rush when the bows went up brought him a curious sense of exultation.
It was stress and effort of muscle and body he had hungered for in the sleepy English town, for slow endurance was nothing new to him, and he was apparently to get it now. There was a meaning in the tense black figures of the men, and the grim impassiveness of Harper’s face as he stiffened his grasp on the wheel, for human fibre was under strain as well as hemp and wood and metal, which groaned under the pressure which racked them to the uttermost limit. Yet while the gunboat crept up astern Appleby felt at home, as though this was not a novel sensation, and he had been through it all, or something very similar, more than once before. The fixed look in the eyes that gleamed in the moonlight, the set faces, and the rigidity of the men’s pose appeared in a curious fashion familiar.
A flash from the steamer roused him, there was a detonation, and a quarter of a mile beyond them a little white cloud rose from the sea. Some of the black figures swung round, but Appleby looked straight in front of him. He did not know why he avoided any abrupt movement, but he felt without reflection that it was incumbent on him. It was, however, not the first time a man of his or his mother’s name had stood outwardly unmoved, at least, under artillery fire.
There was also something to see ahead—a dim, forest-shrouded littoral across which the vapors were streaming, and a faint white line of beach. In the foreground were broad streaks of froth, and the long blur of a jutting point with a yeasty seething about the end of it. Away on the other hand lay a smear of dusky trees, and the gap between them and the point was, he surmised, the bay they had been looking for. It held no shelter for them that he could see. Then Harper called the Spaniard Rosendo.
“There’s not going to be water in for an hour yet, anyway,” he said.
Rosendo shook his head. “There is much tree on the Point,” he said.