They walked on until they came to a cleared space by the water. A wooden bridge had once spanned the creek here, but it had been swept away in a wash-out. The palings of it stuck out, like rib-bones, from an island in midstream. The water went past in a rush, curved out into the sands, and made a bar of seven white breakers as it reached the sea.
“It is from here, on, that one gets the moccasins,” Hilary said. “If any rum-runners come by this swampy bit, they’ll meet their match.”
They went warily forward, lighting themselves with their last copies of La Nacion. They met with no moccasins, but as they crossed the swampy patch by the causeway, the croaking of the bull-frogs hushed for a moment.
“This was the sort of place the Conquistadores landed in,” Hilary said. “Cortés landed in just such another, and burned his ships on the beach behind him. When we go down the coast, we will draw the very beach where he landed. Imagine landing like that, a thousand miles from any store, or any friend, in an unknown world. It was a lonely night for those fellows, when their ships were burned and they turned inland to what was waiting for them.”
“I would not pity them too much,” Margaret answered. “They were there from choice, mainly from greed; nor were they novices at the work. They had also three great advantages, guns, horses and Cortés. The prizes to be won were enormous, and the dangers to be faced only thirst, which was probably chronic with them; hunger, which they must have known in Spain; and death, which they would have had on the gallows if they had not emigrated.”
“I see all that,” he said; “yet there it is. Cortés came to the difficult new thing and did it. Then four hundred years afterwards, fellows like me appear, who write how Cortés did it and how he ought to have done it. Do you think that we last fulfil a function?”
They had now turned off on their way to the house through the forest.
“Yes, Hilary,” she said. “It is even called a kind of wisdom.”
Something in her tone made him pause to look at her.
“I don’t quite see your point,” he said.