At first the Indians thought that they were Spanish, for they had no association with other white men. Association with the Spaniard had been cruel enough for them; they belonged to the disappearing remnant of a people swept by the thousands from their islands to the larger islands, enslaved, oppressed, extirpated. These in the boat were runaways from a hard master, who had stolen this boat and put out, crazy as it was, on what might seem a hopeless voyage. Did they pass through days and nights, and leagues and leagues of sea and go uncaptured by some Spanish craft, did they come at last to their own island, what would they find there? A desert, with, perhaps, a tiny cluster of palm-thatched huts, still clinging, looking for some landing party, looking to be swept away as had been their kith and kin—a perishing group, dejection, languor of life.... But homesickness drove them on; better a death-bed with freedom than the peopled great island where they were slaves! They had felt the Spanish lash and the Spanish irons; they looked doubtfully enough upon the white man and woman, and it was perhaps a question whether now they would not pay back.... But when at last Aderhold spoke, it was in English. They did not know that tongue and they answered in altered and distorted Spanish. He had a little Spanish, and he made them understand briefly that the two had been in an English ship and that there had been a storm and that they were castaways. They were not Spanish, and they did not know the great island or any of the masters. They were English, whom the Spanish hated. That fact being weighed, the Indians turned friendly, laughed and stroked their hands in token of amity, then set apart for the two a great calabash of water, and gave them more cassava bread.