Neither schooner nor sharpie showed a light; and if Benito had been captured on the way over his captors would have been astonished at the cargo he carried. In the bottom of his boat were a dozen boards, each two feet long by a foot wide, with a shallow tin can nailed to the middle of each board. And there were four canisters of colored fire—one red, one yellow, one green, and one white. And there were several yards of fuse, and a box of sand. The colored fire and the fuse Benito had bought when he visited Cuba for the bananas.
"The schooner is to lie to as soon as we sight the lights on the Cuban coast," was the arrangement Benito made with the leader. "After I find the cruiser you will see her lights moving; but she will be nearer to me than to you. I will give you a white light when all is safe. When I burn a white light you can land your men."
The sharpie and the schooner kept well together till they were near the coast of Cuba, and they saw the lights of Sagua la Grande before ten o'clock. This was so much earlier than they had expected that it made some difference in Benito's plans. By midnight the cruiser, following her usual course, should be somewhere off Cardenas; but instead of that they saw her lights directly in front of the spot where they proposed to land the men.
"So much the better," said Benito, when he boarded the schooner for a moment before setting his dangerous plot in motion. "I will coax her down to the eastward."
The leader of the party gave him a warm grip of the hand before they parted.
"You are a brave lad," said he. "When you are under the cruiser's fire, remember that it is in the cause of freedom."
"Oh, I don't think they can hit me," Benito answered; "and I am sure they can't catch me." And he was off.
The schooner and the sharpie had this great advantage; they could see the cruiser's lights, but she could not see them.
Benito beat down the coast till he was about five miles to the eastward of the cruiser, and several miles from the shore. Then he took up one of his boards with the shallow tin can nailed to it.
He poured sand into the can till it was about two-thirds full, and then put in a good inch of red fire. Through a little hole that he had punched in the side of the can he inserted the end of a full half-yard of fuse, and wound it round and round the can, and tied it with a cord to keep it out of the water. Cautiously he struck a match under the stern seat and touched it to the fuse, and laid the board on the surface of the water and left it floating there.