Another weapon appeared to be wanting, in the shape of a large black bottle, containing rum. With this the Coromantee soon supplied himself, drawing one out from its secret hiding-place, and holding it before the light, to make sure that it was full.
“Dis bottle,” said he, as he thrust it into a pouch in his kaross, “I hab kep fo’ dis ’pecial ’casion; it am de bess weapon fo’ my puppos. When dem fellas get dar dose ob de rum, dar’ll be no back out in ’em den. Golly!” he added, glancing out, and seeing that it was now quite dark, “a muss be gone fro’ hya. By de time ole Adam sees de tellemgraff, an’ gets ’cross dem ’ere mountains, it be late ’nuf for de bizness to begin.”
Finishing with this reflection, the sable conjuror took up his “telegraphic apparatus,” and, stepping over the threshold, hurried away from the hut.
Volume Three—Chapter Twenty Eight.
Setting the Signal.
The short tropic twilight had passed, and night had descended upon the Island of Jamaica. It promised to be a night of deepest darkness. The moon would not rise before midnight; and even then she might not be seen, as the canopy was covered with a thick curtain of black cumulus clouds, through which neither star nor speck of blue sky was visible.
Alike lay valleys and mountains shrouded in amorphous darkness; and even the Jumbé Rock—the highest and most conspicuous summit for miles around—was wrapped in complete obscurity. Its vitreous flanks no longer sparkled in the light, since there was none; and its dark mass was so dimly outlined against the equally sombre background of the sky, as to be invisible from the valley below.
The form of a man, groping his way up the narrow ravine that debouched upon the summit of the rock, could not have been distinguished, much less the black hue of his skin, the deformity that marked his figure, or the hideous aspect of his countenance. And yet a man so characterised climbed up there, about half-an-hour after the going down of the sun.