It was night, such a night as only the tropics knows. Night, dead calm, hot, and no moon. Motionless clouds hanging low, and dark. Such a darkness as Pant had never before known hung over all.
Ten feet below him was the sea. He sensed rather than saw it, felt the long rolling lift of its swells as the Carib sailing boat gently rose and fell.
They were a mile out to sea, becalmed. There should be no one near them. There had been no craft near when darkness fell. In such a calm no boat could sail, and who would care to row on such a hot, oppressive night? Yet, strange as it may seem, from time to time he imagined that some faint sound came drifting in from the black void that engulfed them.
“It can’t be,” he told himself. “There was no one near at sunset. There is no one now. That silver box of pearls has gotten on my nerves. I will go to sleep and forget it all.”
He did not sleep at once. His mind was filled with many things. His pursuit of the pit-pan loads of chicle which his grandfather had sent down the river had been a strenuous one. A pit-pan, the seventy foot dugout of the Carib country, when manned by a score of expert boatmen, is a swift river craft. Without giving his grandfather any definite reason for his sudden departure, he had hired a twelve foot dugout from a native bushman and had set out in pursuit of the chicle sack that contained his treasure of pearls in a beaten silver box. For long hours, eating little, scarcely sleeping at all, he had held on in pursuit. At the end of the second day his frail craft had shot boldly out into the ocean. There he met the pit-pans on their return trip.
For the moment he counted all lost. When they told him that the chicle had been stowed away aboard a Carib sailing vessel manned by his grandfather’s men and bound for Belize, his spirits rose. An hour later found him aboard that boat, munching dry casaba bread and talking to the Caribs between bites.
He had not told them why he had come, but gave them to understand that he was to sail to Belize with them.
“In Belize,” he told himself, “before the chicle is brought aboard the steamer, I will claim my precious bag. It will be time enough to decide then what the next move shall be.
“And now here we are becalmed,” he thought to himself with a low shudder.
Strange and terrible things had happened in these waters. They had been the hunting grounds of buccaneers. As he closed his eyes he seemed to hear the creaking of windlasses, the heavy breathing of men in the dark, the boom of cannon, the rattle of muskets, the ring thud of steel.