It was daylight when he awoke. Breakfast was on the table and the boy
did as much justice to the breakfast as he had to the supper. With rest,
his spirits and energy had returned, but he was practically helpless
without his revolver. Besides, on this desolate bit of beach on the
eastern end of Cuba, even if he could escape from his captor, he would
be marooned. Such money as the boy possessed was secreted in Cap
Haitien, most of his friends lived in Western Cuba. If this fisherman
were indeed to aid him to get to Havana, nothing would suit him better.
All through the meal he puzzled over the fisherman's rough mode of life,
and yet his perfect Spanish and courtly manners.
"If the young Senor will accompany me to the stable?" suggested his
host, when the meal was over, the mild words being backed by an
undertone of considerable authority. Stuart would have liked to protest,
for he was feeling chipper and lively, but, just as he was about to
speak, he remembered Andy's remark, on board the motor boat, about "food
for fishes." Probably Cecil's allies were ready for any kind of
bloodshed, and the boy judged that he would be wise to avoid trouble. He
followed without a word.
The stables were of good size and well kept, out of all proportion to
the hut, confirming Stuart's suspicion that a house of some pretensions
was hidden in the forest nearby. A fairly good horse was hitched to a
stoutly-built light cart and the journey began. The driver took a rarely
traveled trail, but, at one point, an opening in the trees showed a snug
little town nestling by a landlocked harbor of unusual beauty.
"What place is that?" queried Stuart, though not expecting a response.
To his surprise, the driver answered promptly.
"That, Senor," he said, "is Baracoa, the oldest town in Cuba, and the
only one that tourists seldom visit."
Whereupon, breaking a long silence, Vellano--for so he had given his
name to Stuart--proceeded to tell the early history of Eastern Cuba with
a wealth of imagery and a sense of romance that held the boy spellbound.
He told of the peaceful Arawaks, the aboriginal inhabitants of the
Greater Antilles, agriculturists and eaters of the cassava plant,
growers and weavers of cotton, even workers of gold. He told of the
invasion of the meat-eating and cannibal Caribs from the Lesser
Antilles, of the wars between the Arawaks and Caribs, and of the
hostility between the two races when Columbus first landed on the
island. He told of the enslavement of the peaceful Arawaks by the
Spaniards, and of the savage massacres by Caribs upon the earliest
Spanish settlements.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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