the work was done, and the four Englishmen lay upon the beach, stiff with the ropes which bound them, the Spaniards who had achieved such a quick capture began to display their exultation with deep guttural cries. Some stood above the captives and uttered the shrill exclamations for many minutes; others ran along the beach calling loudly to their fellows on the cliffs above that the work was done; others, again, brought torches, which they thrust almost into the faces of the prisoners under the pretence of examining them. Nor was the band lacking the picturesque—numbering, as Messenger computed, at least thirty men, all armed with the and with muskets, and clothed in garments which represented at once the tawdry splendour of the southern taste and the warmer fashion of the mountain country. Here were rateros in the gaudy cloaks of the Iberian; hulking seamen in long mantles of rich and faded silk; bearded men whose sashes shone with hues of intense red and aggressive yellow; swarthy Galicians in the black zamarra; simple peasants who capered in the torch-light; even boys who at the victory. And for a long space they kept up the tow-row and the din, and threatened the bound men with their knives or their cudgels.
That there was any merit in the capture is not to be conceded. Messenger's own record, from which this present account is chiefly written, establishes the simplicity of it. "I lay it," says he, "entirely to my own folly in getting upon the roof of the rock-house that we were taken. The Spaniards must have watched for us upon the shore all day, and Burke's madness in coming out of the haven gave them the clue they waited for. When they did spring upon us, it was with the dash of a cavalry charge. I had three men upon my back and three at my throat before I could put a hand upon my pistol; and scarce had I touched the floor when a fellow whipped a slip-knot round my arms, and pinned them so that the rope cut my flesh."
The record of the others is to the same effect; and in one matter, at any rate, their thoughts were very similar. That this was the supremity of their disaster was as plain to them as the faces of the swarthy horde who gibbered upon the sand; but whether the Spaniards had actually come upon the gold—or, indeed, knew any thing of its history—they could not tell. It was sufficient for them that they were irreparably in the power of a babbling crew who seemed to restrain themselves from immediate murder with personal pain; and they could only conclude, with overwhelming bitterness, that chance had written for them this blunt termination of their emprise, and that they among them would be lucky who lived to see another sun.
As the moments passed this latter thought became their only one in the presence of the immediate danger from the exulting Spaniards. Some of these, in the play of their humour, now began to thrash the bodies of the bound with their heavy wooden clubs; others thrust their torches very near to the faces of the prone men, or threatened them with their cuchillos. It is scarce possible, in fact, to believe that the end of the four would not have come quickly had there not been the intervention of one in authority, a giant of a man, in a capa edged with fur and a fine sombrero, at the sound of whose voice the mob fell back and stood silent. But he, coming up to Messenger and making him a profound bow, seemed to be finding apology; and when he had doffed his hat many times, he turned about and spoke to a man at his elbow, and at that the cords which held the necks and the ankles of the captives were cut, and the four of them were lifted into two boats which had been rowed to the sand during the mêlée.
The first of these, a pretty craft finished like a yacht's boat, took Messenger and Fisher; the second, a plainer ship, but one holding at least twenty men, had Burke and the nigger. And the boats being thus laden, the Spaniards rowed quickly up the bay, and Messenger's hope sank low when he observed that their course was for the lagoon he had fled from in the morning, and that the men who had debouched upon them were also those who had cried to one another in the door of the tunnel.