Silencio put his hands to his mouth and shouted: "Do not fear; I will save you!" He shook his clenched hand at Escobeda. "You shall pay for that! By God in Heaven! you shall pay for that!"
Yes, pay for it, but how? How? Oh, God! how? He was so helpless. No one to aid him, no one to succour.
At this defiance of Silencio's there came an order to halt. The men faced the Casa de Caoba, Escobeda placed his rifle to his shoulder, but as he fired, Raquel quickly reached out her hand and dashed the muzzle downward. A crash of glass below stairs told Silencio where the shot had found entrance.
"And for that shot, also, you shall pay. Aye, for twenty thousand good glass windows." Glass windows are a luxury in the island.
A burst of derisive laughter and a scattering flight of bullets were thrown back at him by the motley crew. They reined their horses to the right, turned a corner, and were lost in their own dust.
Silencio descended the stairs, how he never knew. He ran through the patio and the main rooms, and out on to the veranda, from which the path led toward the gate of the enclosure. He was beside himself. He seized his gun from the rack; he cocked it as he ran.
"He said that I could not reach him upon the water; I can reach him upon the land. Piombo, my horse! Do not wait to saddle him, bring him at once. No, I cannot reach him upon the water—"
A sound of footsteps. A head bound in a ragged cloth appeared above the flower boxes which edged the veranda, and pushed its way between the leaves. A body followed, and then a man ascended slowly to a level with Don Gil Silencio. Over his shoulder was slung a shotgun; in his leathern belt, an old one of his master's, was thrust a machete; from his hand swung a lantern with white glass slides. This man was stupid but kindly. He pattered across the veranda with bare and callous feet, and came to a halt within a few paces of Don Gil. There he stopped and leaned against the jamb of the open door.
At night Andres hung a lantern upon the asta at the headland yonder, more as a star of cheer than as a warning. The red lantern on Los Santos, some miles further down the coast, was the beacon for and the warning to mariners. The ray from its one red sector illumined the channel until the morning sun came again to light the way. When the white pane changed the ray of red to one of white, the pilot shouted, "Hard over." With a wide and foaming curve, the vessel swept round and out to sea, thus avoiding the sand spit of Palmacristi.
Silencio's eyes fell upon the lantern in the hand of Andres, and in that moment the puzzle of the hour was solved. So suddenly does the bread of necessity demand the rising of the yeast of invention. The expression of Don Gil's face had changed in a moment from abject gloom to radiant exultation.