Four Bells: A Tale of the Caribbean

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

The effort of rising to his feet left him all spent and trembling. He could not have walked a score of yards in the deadly heat of the sun. The muscles of his back were so stiffened and inflamed that he was bent like an old man knotted with rheumatism. His head was even more troublesome. After the lull, it was aflame again. One moment he was able to think, the next he was lost in a welter of phantasms. He closed his eyes because the light hurt them. He would hear the Colombian soldiers when they came near the watch-tower.

A little while, however, and the aching brightness of the sky was tempered by clouds that gathered swiftly. They grew black as they rolled toward the zenith, with a flickering play of lightning. The distant mutter of thunder swelled in rolling detonations. At first the rain came in a flurry of drops. Richard Cary mistook the sound for the pit-pat-pat of the hurrying feet of Colombian soldiers. With a groan he lurched out of the watch-tower to finish the thing in the open.

The tropical rain came down like a flood, as though the clouds spilled a solid deluge of water. A whistling squall swept it in sheets. Between the parapets was a gushing river which spouted through the embrasures and rushed down the ramp. It was a torrential downpour unknown to northern climes.

To Richard Cary it was the saving grace of heaven. It beat against him, cooling his parched skin, refreshing him like an elixir. It quenched the fires that had so grievously tormented him. He felt the strength revive in his weary body. He forgot the stiffness, the hurts, the hopelessness of a man in the last ditch. He scooped up the rain in his cupped hand and lapped it like a dog.

The blessed rain did more than this. It offered a chance of extricating himself from the immediate perils besetting him. The squall drove the rain in sheets, obscuring the buildings of the city, veiling the harbor. He gripped the machete blade between his teeth and threw a leg over the outer parapet. It was a thirty-foot drop to the bottom, which was a shallow depression where the moat had been. The stones had been cunningly cut and fitted to build a wall with a smooth facing, but the tooth of time had gnawed deep crevices in which grass had taken root.

Richard Cary’s fingers found rough corners to cling to, and lodgment for his toes. Cautiously groping, he let himself down from one stone to another. It was not a vastly difficult feat, easier than those other Devon seamen of long ago had found it to scale these same walls with ladders. When giddiness halted him, he fastened himself to the stones like a great bat and waited for the spell to pass.

Finally he let go and dropped to the ground. It had been a wrenching ordeal, but when the pain was unendurable he had the machete to bite on. The space outside the wall, which was a populous open-air market and resort for idlers, had been suddenly deserted. The terrific rain had driven every last soul to shelter. The fugitive made a limping détour to reach a strip of beach beyond the quay. Fishermen with their baskets, the vendors of green stuffs, the carts and the burros, had scampered to find dry places.

It was a homing instinct, this endeavor to escape to salt water. There was no plan. In fact there was no clear expectation of getting anywhere. It was enough, for the moment, to be outside the walls of Cartagena. Far better risk drowning than be riddled with bullets by the comrades of Francisco and Manuel.

Between the driving sheets of rain he caught glimpses of the yellow beach. Two or three dugout canoes were drawn up. One of them had a lading of green bananas. The fugitive plodded toward them and no man came to hinder him. The rain was all about him like a misty curtain. He stumbled in the soft sand above high-water mark and fell against the gunwale of an empty canoe. It was a small craft, but heavy. To push it into the water seemed a task altogether beyond him. However, he set his shoulder against the blunt bow and dug his feet into the sand.

Gashed and harried and fevered, it was the inherited bulldog strain in “Big Dick” Cary that sufficed for this final struggle on the sands of Cartagena. The canoe moved, an inch at a time, to the harder surface of the tide-washed beach. Then it slid faster until the surf kicked up by the squall was splashing against it. The stern floated.