No one spoke for some time; then, when they had safely passed the ship,
and were well out to sea, they had plenty to say to each other. Harry
told how he had heard the baying of the dogs from his hiding-place; how
they had come nearer and nearer, and he had felt a strange horror, which
nothing else had ever given him before, at the idea of being torn in
pieces by those blood-thirsty animals; then how the sounds had told him
the dogs were close at hand, the shouting and yelling negroes urging
them on, and the pirates mingling oaths with these cries as they were
entangled in the scrub or the mangrove branches. Yes, and at last they
had come close by, up to the foot of the tree, and had paused there as
the baying dogs rushed round and round undecided, till one of them had
evidently scented out the trail made by Andreas, and the negroes had
hunted the dogs forward. Harry’s face as he told the story still bore
traces of the terrible ordeal he had passed through during those few
moments of intense suspense.
’I fancied before that I was brave, but I only know that when I heard
those evil beasts I had no more courage left in me than a zany at a
village fair; and when they had passed by, I lay on the floor of my
hiding-place as if I were already dead. I have never before been in such
dire terror of my life; but in truth such barbarous ways are not honest
warfare.’
’Yet I saw my father hunted down by wild dogs,’ said Andreas, on whom
this fact had made a lasting impression; and Carlo looked grave, for he
knew well enough that his people it was who had perpetrated such
cruelties on the gentle Indians, and that Spain would ever have to bear
the shame of the first cruelties in the New World--cruelties which other
nations had not been slow to adopt; till the black plague-spot had
spread all over the fair lands and the newly discovered islands.
All night they rowed hard, and when daylight came, and with it all the
glory of the tropical sunrise, St. Catherine was no longer in sight; and
unless any other knew the secret of the desert island and betrayed the
knowledge to Sieur Simon, they were saved. Each in his own heart
thanked God.
Harry’s face began to recover its more cheerful expression: he was not
leaving his loved ones as was Carlo; but was this journey bringing him
much nearer his own home?
’When shall we sight this place?’ asked Carlo wearily, when the sun
beating down on their heads reminded him that he was now not nearly as
strong as before his illness; ’and what do you call it, Andreas? It
seems as if we were going to a land of nowhere.’
’It has no name known to the white men, Señor; but my father, who took
me there when I was a boy, always called it by an Indian name which
meant "Queen of the Water," because of the one tall Jagua palm-tree
which stands high and solitary on it, and can be seen from a long
distance.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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