Nunn cut me a stout ironwood cudgel as a handy weapon.
At last the night came, and still we waited, loath to say good-bye. We had come out of the jungle and were sitting in the still warm sand talking in low tones and watching the stars. At last when my watch told me it was 10 we rose, and, shaking hands warmly, parted, he going east to Cajio, I west toward Pinar del Rio and the rebel camps.
Of course, my great danger lay in meeting soldiers who would stop me. Indeed any one who met a stranger and a foreigner heading west would either stop him or give an alarm, and if once arrested (passports so near the enemy's camp were useless) it meant death, or what was quite as bad, incarceration in a filthy prison until my case was reported on to the Captain-General in Havana. That, of course, meant my return to Havana and possibly to England.
Everything is very primitive in Cuba. The common people--that is, the whites and free people--live in mere huts or cabins, and sleep in hammocks under roofs open on two sides. All go to bed soon after sunset, so there was no danger in night traveling, save only in meeting the sentries or running on some detached post of soldiers.
In case of meeting these, I had resolved to plunge into the tropical jungle which came close down to the beach.
Neither night traveling nor the situation had any terrors for me. I felt my only danger lay in stumbling upon some outpost or sentry who might perceive me before I saw him and so cover me with his rifle before challenging, but I knew from observation since my arrival in Cuba that the discipline among the Spanish soldiers was very slack, and I had a pretty firm belief that isolated sentries usually took a nap while waiting the relief.
After leaving Nunn I started out at a quick pace, alert and confident. The moon had gone down, but the Caribbean Sea was lovely in the starlight, and between watching the phosphorescent ripples of the waters and listening to the night noises of the jungle I soon discovered I was enjoying my jaunt and found myself anticipating the pleasure of the free, open life ahead of me when once beyond the Spanish outposts and a soldier of fortune. I thought what a story of adventure I would have to relate when a year or two later I rejoined my wife and friends, and I felt that a good record won in a fight for "free Cuba" would make men willing to forget my past.