Montoro's thoughts flew back to the cannon on board. He felt just then as if nothing on earth would so well satisfy him as to see them pointed at the Governor's house, to see their flash, to hear their roar, and to witness the wholesale destruction they could cause. "Why was there no young Las Casas to avenge this insult to the Admiral?" But there was One mightier than Las Casas to do that, One whose artillery was mightier than the cannon in which Montoro put such confidence. Two days passed, and then the tropical storm burst in all its fury. To such poor, unforbidden shelter as he could find the Admiral had guided his battered little squadron, and there he and his followers waited, and watched the gathering gloom of earth and sea and air and sky; and well it might seem to some of those watchers that a spirit of retributive wrath was brooding over the scene of cruelty, treachery, and insolence. "It will require all their seamanship to ride out the coming hurricane," said the pilot, Antonio de Alaminos, on the second day, as he regarded somewhat dubiously their own quarters. And Diego Mendez answered moodily: "I should heave no sigh if they and their ill-gotten wealth went to the bottom of the deep before mine eyes; but I do grieve to have heard that on the craziest of their barques they are carrying home the Admiral's gold, the poor remnant of his rents they have permitted him." "Never have care for that, Señor," said the young Fernando earnestly. "It is my father's, and it will be kept safe for him." "It is as well that thou canst console thyself with that belief, any way," muttered the man, as the boy went off to where Columbus was already issuing orders, needed by the sudden wild gusts of wind that came as forerunners of the tempest. Then came the wild roar and whirl, and darkness made more awful by the fiery flashes that momentarily illumined the terrors of the scene. On land trees uprooted, houses flung into ruins as though made by children's hands of cards, the fields of maize changed as in an instant from fields of gold to grey, scorched deserts. Living beings struck at a breath into corpses; others crushed in the downfall of their homes. And at sea those four poor cranky vessels, which were all a great country could afford its great benefactor, tossing and toiling in the boiling sea. Now the waters would seethe as though some hideous cauldron, prepared by evil spirits for some demon feast, and the doomed vessels shook through every plank and spar as though with living horror. And then, with a sudden shock the waters would rush together, and mount wildly into mountain waves crowned with crests of foam.