With one thought uppermost in his mind, that of escape, he leaped for the window, gripped the sill, drew himself up, balanced for a second there in the moonlight, then dropped.
He landed rather solidly, not upon the tossing sea, but upon tossing dry land.
A moving figure loomed before him.
“A guard!” His quickened senses registered the thought.
“Strike first, and talk afterwards.” His head buried itself into the soft center of the moving object. With a grunt the man went down.
He wished the earth would stand still. It made him seasick, that rocking motion. They hadn’t had a reason for putting him in prison—not any real reason. He had done nothing except insist upon buying twenty thousand bunches of bananas. He had tried to do a great service to a splendid old man and a beautiful girl. He had reason enough for wanting to be out of prison, plenty of reasons. There was the girl, Madge Kennedy, back there in the orchard of forbidden fruit, and her grandfather, the aged Britisher who was so much of a man and so little of a business man that his orchards and banana plantations would never make him a cent unless some one took a hand. And there was old Jorgensen, good old salt water skipper, walking his deck night and day and staring gloomily at the Caribbean Sea.
The earth stopped rocking for an instant. An open court lay before him. He was beginning to realize that he was having a new experience. One of those frequent Central American earthquakes had broken loose. That was why a stone prison had seemed so like a ship on a tossing sea.
“Open places are best,” he told himself.
He had taken a dozen steps when there came a shock which sent him down like a ten-pin. At the same instant he touched an object lying near him.
He found it soft and yielding. It was a weeping child, a beautiful, black-haired, black-eyed girl of seven.