“This is momentous news, indeed,” remarked Smellie when I had finished. “We must leave you to-night, I fear, Don Manuel, reluctant as we both must be to cut short so very agreeable an acquaintance. But I trust we shall have many opportunities of visiting you again, and so keeping alive the friendship established between us; and as to Señor Madera—if Hawkesley is only correct in his conjectures as to the schooner he saw—why, I trust we may be able to effectually and permanently relieve you of his disagreeable attentions before twenty-four hours have passed over our heads.”
Don Manuel bowed. “If Señor Madera is indeed the captain of a slave-ship, as I have sometimes felt inclined to believe he is,” said he, “I beg that you will not permit the accident of having encountered him under my roof to influence you in any way in his favour. As I have already said, he is only an acquaintance—not a friend of mine—and if he is a transgressor against the laws relating to the slave-trade, make him suffer for it, if you can lay hands upon him. With regard to your proposed attempt to rejoin your ship to-night, I very much regret that I am only able to offer you the most meagre assistance; such as it is, however, you are heartily welcome to it. I have a canoe down in the creek yonder, and you are very welcome to take her; but she is only a small affair, and as I presume you are not very much accustomed to the handling of canoes, you will have to be exceedingly careful or you may meet with an upset. And that, let me tell you, may possibly prove a very serious affair, since the creek, ay, and the river itself, swarms with crocodiles.”
Smellie duly expressed his thankful acceptance of Don Manuel’s kind offer, and the conversation then became general. At the conclusion of the meal Smellie requested the favour of a few minutes’ private conversation with Don Manuel; and that gentleman, with a somewhat questioning and surprised look, bowed an affirmative and at once led the way to his own especial sanctum.
I never actually heard what was the nature of the momentous communication which the gallant second lieutenant wished so suddenly to make to his host; but from the length of time that they remained closeted together, and the remark of Don Manuel when they at length reappeared—“Very well, my dear sir, then that is settled; upon the conditions I have named you can have her,”—I made a pretty shrewd guess at it.
In the meantime Doña Antonia had reappeared, very little the worse for her adventure; she was very pale, it is true, and she became perceptibly paler when, with that want of tact which is one of my most marked characteristics, I abruptly told her that we were on the point of leaving her to rejoin our ship. But she amply redeemed this want of colour by the deep rosy flush with which she greeted Smellie’s approach and the low whispered request in response to which she placed her hand on his arm and retired with him to the verandah.
It was about 9:30 p.m. when they reappeared, Smellie looking very grave, but at the same time rather exultant, and poor Antonia in tears, which she made no attempt whatever to conceal. I was, of course, all ready to start at a moment’s notice. We had no preparations to make, in fact, and we at once proceeded to the disagreeable task of saying farewell to our kind and generous host. It was a painful business; for though we had not known Don Manuel and his daughter very long, we had still known them quite long enough to have acquired for them both a very large measure of esteem and regard—in Smellie’s case there could no longer be the least doubt that his feelings toward his hostess were even warmer than this—so we hurried over the leave-taking with all speed, and then set off down the pathway, under Pedro’s guidance, on our road to the creek.
It was by this time pitch dark. The stars had all disappeared; the sky had become obscured by a heavy pall of thunder-cloud; and away to the eastward the lightning was already beginning to flash and the thunder to growl ominously. Before we reached the gate in the palisading Pedro had volunteered the prognostication of a stormy night, utterly unfit for such an expedition as that upon which we were bound, and had strongly urged us more than once to follow his counsel and postpone the attempt. But to this proposition we could not, of course, listen for a moment. If we missed the present opportunity to rejoin the Daphne it was impossible to conjecture when another might offer; and pleasant though our sojourn under Don Manuel’s hospitable roof had undoubtedly been, it was not business; every day so spent was a day distinctly lost in the pursuit of our professional interests. So we plodded steadily on, and in about half an hour’s time reached the head of the creek, where, carefully housed under a low thatch covering, we found the canoe.
She was, indeed, a frail craft in which to undertake such a journey as ours, being only some two feet six inches beam, by about sixteen inches deep, and twenty feet long; hollowed out of a single log. She had no thwarts, and the paddlers were therefore compelled to squat tailor-fashion in the bottom of her, looking forward. This was, so far, fortunate; since she was so frightfully crank that, with such unaccustomed canoeists as ourselves, it was only by keeping our centres of gravity low down that we prevented her capsizing the moment we stepped into her. Pedro, worthy soul, detained us about twenty minutes whilst he explained the peculiarities of the craft and the proper mode of handling the paddles; and then, with Smellie aft and me forward, we bade the old fellow good-bye and boldly shoved off down the creek.
The channel here being narrow, and overarched to a great extent with trees, the darkness was quite as intense as it had been on our journey from the house through the wood and down to the creek; so dark was it, indeed, that but for the lightning which now flashed around us with rapidly-increasing frequency, it would have been quite impossible for us to see where we were going. This stygian darkness, whilst it proved an obstacle to our rapid progress, promised to afford us, by way of compensation, most valuable assistance in another way, since we hoped to slip past the schooner undetected in the impenetrable obscurity; our desire just then being to avoid anything like a renewal of our acquaintance with Señor Madera so soon after our very recent little misunderstanding. Unfortunately there were two or three phenomena which combined to render this feat a matter of difficulty. The first was the vivid lightning which, at increasingly brief intervals, lit up the channel with noontide distinctness. The next was the failure of the wind; a stark breathless calm having fallen upon the face of nature like a pall, in the which not so much as a single leaf stirred; and the whole insect-world, contrary to its usual custom, awaiting in hushed expectancy the outburst of the coming storm, a great and death-like silence prevailed, through which the slightest sound which we might accidentally make would have been heard for a long distance. And another, and perhaps the worst of all, was the highly phosphorescent state of the water. This was so excessive that the slightest ripple under the bows of the canoe, along her sides, and for some distance in her wake, together with the faint swirls created by our paddles, produced long trailing lines and eddies of vivid silvery light which could scarcely fail to attract the attention of a vigilant look-out and so betray our whereabouts. We were thus compelled to observe the utmost circumspection in our advance, which was made, as far as was practicable, through the deepest shadows of the overhanging foliage.
We were creeping slowly down the channel in this cautious fashion when a slight and almost imperceptible splash from the opposite bank attracted my attention. Glancing across in that direction I noticed a slowly spreading circle of luminous ripples, and beneath them a curious patch of pale phosphorescent light rapidly advancing toward us. In a few seconds it was almost directly underneath the canoe and keeping pace with her. To my consternation I then saw that it was a crocodile about the same length, “over all,” as the canoe, the phosphorescence of the water causing his scaly carcass to gleam like a watery moon and distinctly revealing his every movement. We could even see his upturned eyes maintaining a vigilant watch upon us.