As they scrambled down to the dry ravine, Charlie Burnham remarked, with some heat:
“One smooth guy, Captain Cary. He would double-cross his own grandmother. What’s the answer? It don’t look much like waiting him out. Shall we go ahead?”
“It looks that way, Charlie. I don’t know how many men he has. After we begin work, is he liable to jump us? I can’t put our whole crew in camp. It would be foolish to leave the steamer without protection.”
“Sure it would. And I mustn’t let the fires go dead. If it came on to blow hard, we might have to steam out of the bay. And you’ll need an anchor watch, of course.”
“Well, we can get organized by to-morrow. Now let’s see what we can do with this next bearing, from the hump of the hill and along the ravine.”
They floundered through dense growth and over gullied ground until they had traversed the estimated distance in rods. No attempt was made to measure it accurately. This brought them to a lower rampart of cliff, crumbled and rotten, in which bushes and creepers had found root. There were wide fissures, as though an earthquake had shaken the limestone formation. Richard Cary made a hasty calculation. There was no other “face of cliff” nearby. They could not be very many rods from the spot. Here was an agreeable camp site in a grove of cocoanut palms, with a spring of clear water just beyond it.
“We shall have to make our own trail to the bay,” said Cary, “but it’s not as rough as I expected. We don’t want to pack our stuff in over Don Miguel’s road.”
“Leave him alone,” agreed Charlie Burnham. “I don’t feel neighborly. He’ll have me sitting up nights.”
“Why, there would be no fun in it without him,” cheerfully protested Richard Cary. “It would be a chore, like digging post-holes back on those New Hampshire farms of ours. I didn’t dare expect anything as good as this Don Miguel O’Donnell. This may turn out to be livelier than Cartagena.”