“No,” replied Wilson; “it never did.”
“It has struck me that some such thing might happen to us,” continued Chase, in a trembling voice. “This Creole is a rebel, and thinks we are friends of his. The Spaniards think so too, for they have searched the house with the intention of capturing us. If we had fallen into their hands, might they not have put an end to us without giving us an opportunity to say a word in our defence, believing as they do that we are friends of the Cubans?”
“It is possible,” replied Wilson, coolly.
“Gracious! If I had thought of all these things, I never would have had anything to do with this expedition, I tell you. How would I look, set up against a brick wall, with half a dozen Spaniards standing in front of me, ready to shoot me down at the word? I wish I had stayed on Lost Island and starved there.” And Chase, terrified almost beyond measure by the picture he had drawn, jumped to his feet, hurried off through the darkness, and bumped his head severely against the solid oak planks which formed the door of their prison.
“You are not set up against a brick wall yet, at all events,” said Wilson, laughing, in spite of himself. “Don’t take on so, old fellow, or I shall believe you are in a fair way to become a coward. Here’s a dry-goods box. Let’s lie down on it and try to get a wink of sleep.”
“Sleep!” groaned Chase, holding one hand to his head, and with the other feeling his way through the darkness, in the direction from which his companion’s voice sounded; “how can you think of such a thing? Don’t lie there so still. Wake up and talk to me.”
It was not possible that Chase could ever become a greater coward than he was at that moment, and he told himself so. The thought that he was in a strange country, surrounded by men who were in arms against one another, and that some of them—perhaps the very ones who had perpetrated the cruelties of which he had read in the papers—had been in that very house searching for him, was dreadful. It tested his fortitude to the very utmost. Even the darkness which filled the wine-cellar had terrors for him, and he hardly dared to move a finger, for fear it might come in contact with some living thing. For three long hours he sat upon his box, in a state of terror beyond our power to describe, and all this while, the plucky Wilson, with a happy indifference to circumstances, which Chase greatly envied, slumbered heavily.