“Phew!” whistled Ned. “Wonder how father’d like that! Anyhow, we don’t know there’s any war.”
“We’d be in trouble anyhow,” said the señor. “But we are all in the dark about it. We have been over three weeks on the way, and all the war news we had when we started was nearly a month old. We can only guess what has been going on. Here we are, though, in a storm that is driving us along first-rate into the Gulf of Mexico. We may be four days’ sail from Vera Cruz in a bee-line, and the Goshawk is a racer, but we may not be able to make a straight course. Well, well, the captain will keep on all the canvas that’s safe, and we may get there. Hullo! the day is beginning to dawn. Now our real danger begins.”
He said no more, and Ned walked forward with something altogether new on his mind. An American boy, crammed full of patriotism, and wishing that he were in General Taylor’s army, he was, nevertheless, by no fault of his own, one of the crew of a ship which was carrying ammunition to the enemy. He almost felt as if he were fighting his own country, and it made him sick. He had an idea, moreover, that Señor Zuroaga was only half willing to help his old enemy Santa Anna.
“I don’t care if Captain Kemp is an Englishman,” he said to himself, “he had no business to run father and his partners into such a scrape.”
That might be so, and perhaps neither Kemp, nor Zuroaga, nor even Ned himself, knew all about the laws of war which govern such cases, but just then there flashed across his mind a very dismal suggestion, as he stared down at the deck he stood on.
“What,” he asked himself, “if any accident should touch off those barrels of powder down there? Why, we’d all be blown sky-high and nobody’d ever know what had become of us. There’d be nothing but chips left.”
He tried not to think about that, and went below to get his breakfast, while Captain Kemp ordered his sailors to send up another sail, remarking to Señor Zuroaga:
“We must make the most we can of this wind. Every hour counts now. I’ll take the Goshawk to Vera Cruz, or I’ll run her under water.”
“Have you any idea where we are just now?” asked the señor.
“Well on into the gulf,” said the captain, cheerfully. “We made a splendid run in the night, thanks to the gale. I hope it will blow on, and I think there is no danger of our being overhauled until we are off the Mexican coast. I wish, though, that I knew whether or not the war has actually been declared.”