“Take this man into the hold and shut him up there!” cried Walter, almost beside himself, with indignation and alarm. “I don’t want to hear another word from him.”
“O, you needn’t mind those things,” said Pierre, as Perk and Bab picked up their carbines. “I am willing to go, but I shan’t stay there long. You are as good as captured by that frigate already.”
“Take him away!” shouted Walter. “Stay here, Perk, I want to talk to you.”
The young captain began nervously pacing the deck, while the other boys marched their prisoner through the cabin into the galley, and assisted him rather roughly into the hold. They placed him with his back against one of the water-butts, and while Eugene was looking for a rope with which to confine his feet, Wilson began to question him: “Since you have shown yourself so obliging,” said he, “perhaps you won’t mind telling me what was in the note that darkey gave to Don Casper.”
“There wasn’t much,” was the reply. “It was written by Captain Conway, who told the Don that the bearers were members of his crew, and that he had sent them out there to make arrangements with him about landing our cargo of arms.”
“Well, go on. You said you sent Chase and me to the Don’s, on purpose to have us captured by the Spaniards.”
“We thought that perhaps we might get rid of you in that way. We know that the Don is suspected, and we believe that if strangers, and Americans too, were seen going there in the daytime, they would get themselves into trouble.”
“We came very near it,” said the boy, drawing a long breath when he thought of all that had passed at the plantation, “but the Don took care of us.”
“Tell us all about it, Wilson,” said Eugene, coming aft with the rope at this moment. “By the way, where is Chase? I haven’t seen anything of him.”
Wilson replied that he hadn’t seen him either very recently. He hoped that he was all right, but he feared the worst, for he was still ashore, and might fall into the hands of the Spaniards. And then he went on to relate, in a few hurried words, the adventures that had befallen him since he left the yacht at the wharf, to all of which Pierre listened attentively, now and then manifesting his satisfaction by broad grins. There were two things he could not understand, Wilson said, in conclusion: one was, how the Don escaped being made a prisoner when the patrol surrounded the house, and the other, where Chase went in such a hurry. In regard to the missing boy we will here remark, that none of our young friends knew what had become of him until several months afterward, and then they met him very unexpectedly, and in a place where they least imagined they would see him. The mystery of the Don’s escape was no mystery after all. When he locked the boys in their place of concealment, he made his exit from the house through one of the cellar windows, and hid himself in a thicket of evergreens beside the back verandah. Watching his opportunity when the soldiers were busy searching the building, he crept quietly away and took refuge in one of the negro cabins. He kept a sharp eye on the movements of the patrol, and saw that those who left the house took several riderless horses with them. This made it evident that some of their number were still on the premises, and that they had remained to arrest the Don when he came back. But of course he did not go back. As soon as it grew dark his overseer brought him his cloak and weapons, and then returning to the house, succeeded in releasing the boys, as we have described.