XI
There was no chance for Clay to speak to Hope again, though he felt thecruelty of having to leave her with everything between them in thisinterrupted state. But their friends stood about her, interested andexcited over this expedition of smuggled arms, unconscious of the greatmiracle that had come into his life and of his need to speak to and totouch the woman who had wrought it. Clay felt how much more bindingthan the laws of life are the little social conventions that must beobserved at times, even though the heart is leaping with joy or rackedwith sorrow. He stood within a few feet of the woman he loved, wantingto cry out at her and to tell her all the wonderful things which he hadlearned were true for the first time that night, but he was forcedinstead to keep his eyes away from her face and to laugh and answerquestions, and at the last to go away content with having held her handfor an instant, and to have heard her say "good-luck."
MacWilliams called Kirkland to the office at the other end of theCompany's wire, and explained the situation to him. He was instructedto run an engine and freight-cars to a point a quarter of a mile northof the fort, and to wait there until he heard a locomotive whistle orpistol shots, when he was to run on to the fort as quickly and asnoiselessly as possible. He was also directed to bring with him asmany of the American workmen as he could trust to keep silentconcerning the events of the evening. At ten o'clock MacWilliams hadthe steam up in a locomotive, and with his only passenger-car in therear, ran it out of the yard and stopped the train at the point nearestthe cars where ten of the 'Vesta's' crew were waiting. The sailors hadno idea as to where they were going, or what they were to do, but thefact that they had all been given arms filled them with satisfaction,and they huddled together at the bottom of the car smoking andwhispering, and radiant with excitement and satisfaction.
The train progressed cautiously until it was within a half mile belowthe fort, when Clay stopped it, and, leaving two men on guard, steppedoff the remaining distance on the ties, his little band followingnoiselessly behind him like a procession of ghosts in the moonlight.They halted and listened from time to time as they drew near the ruins,but there was no sound except the beating of the waves on the rocks andthe rustling of the sea-breeze through the vines and creepers aboutthem.
Clay motioned to the men to sit down, and, beckoning to MacWilliams,directed him to go on ahead and reconnoitre.
"If you fire we will come up," he said. "Get back here as soon as youcan."
"Aren't you going to make sure first that Kirkland is on the other sideof the fort?" MacWilliams whispered.
Clay replied that he was certain Kirkland had already arrived. "He hada shorter run than ours, and he wired you he was ready to start when wewere, didn't he?" MacWilliams nodded.
"Well, then, he is there. I can count on Kirk."
MacWilliams pulled at his heavy boots and hid them in the bushes, withhis helmet over them to mark the spot. "I feel as though I was goingto rob a bank," he chuckled, as he waved his hand and crept off intothe underbrush.
For the first few moments the men who were left behind sat silent, butas the minutes wore on, and MacWilliams made no sign, they grewrestless, and shifted their positions, and began to whisper together,until Clay shook his head at them, and there was silence again untilone of them, in trying not to cough, almost strangled, and the otherstittered and those nearest pummelled him on the back.
Clay pulled out his revolver, and after spinning the cylinder under hisfinger-nail, put it back in its holder again, and the men, taking thisas an encouraging promise of immediate action, began to examine theirweapons again for the twentieth time, and there was a chorus of short,muffled clicks as triggers were drawn back and cautiously lowered andlevers shot into place and caught again.
One of the men farthest down the track raised his arm, and all turnedand half rose as they saw MacWilliams coming toward them on a run,leaping noiselessly in his stocking feet from tie to tie. He droppedon his knees between Clay and Langham.
"The guns are there all right," he whispered, panting, "and there areonly three men guarding them. They are all sitting on the beachsmoking. I hustled around the fort and came across the whole outfit inthe second gallery. It looks like a row of coffins, ten coffins andabout twenty little boxes and kegs. I'm sure that means they arecoming for them to-night. They've not tried to hide them nor to coverthem up. All we've got to do is to walk down on the guards and tellthem to throw up their hands. It's too easy."
Clay jumped to his feet. "Come on," he said.
"Wait till I get my boots on first," begged MacWilliams. "I wouldn'tgo over those cinders again in my bare feet for all the buried treasurein the Spanish Main. You can make all the noise you want; the waveswill drown it."
With MacWilliams to show them the way, the men scrambled up the outerwall of the fort and crossed the moss-covered ramparts at the run.Below them, on the sandy beach, were three men sitting around adriftwood fire that had sunk to a few hot ashes. Clay nodded toMacWilliams. "You and Ted can have them," he said. "Go with him,Langham."
The sailors levelled their rifles at the three lonely figures on thebeach as the two boys slipped down the wall and fell on their hands andfeet in the sand below, and then crawled up to within a few feet ofwhere the men were sitting.
As MacWilliams raised his revolver one of the three, who was cookingsomething over the fire, raised his head and with a yell of warningflung himself toward his rifle.
"Up with your hands!" MacWilliams shouted in Spanish, and Langham,running in, seized the nearest sentry by the neck and shoved his facedown between his knees into the sand.
There was a great rattle of falling stones and of breaking vines as thesailors tumbled down the side of the fort, and in a half minute's timethe three sentries were looking with angry, frightened eyes at thecircle of armed men around them.
"Now gag them," said Clay. "Does anybody here know how to gag a man?"he asked. "I don't."
"Better make him tell what he knows first," suggested Langham.
But the Spaniards were too terrified at what they had done, or at whatthey had failed to do, to further commit themselves.
"Tie us and gag us," one of them begged. "Let them find us so. It isthe kindest thing you can do for us."
"Thank you, sir," said Clay. "That is what I wanted to know. They arecoming to-night, then. We must hurry."
The three sentries were bound and hidden at the base of the wall, witha sailor to watch them. He was a young man with a high sense of theimportance of his duties, and he enlivened the prisoners by poking themin the ribs whenever they moved.
Clay deemed it impossible to signal Kirkland as they had arranged todo, as they could not know now how near those who were coming for thearms might be. So MacWilliams was sent back for his engine, and a fewminutes later they heard it rumble heavily past the fort on its way tobring up Kirkland and the flat cars. Clay explored the lower chambersof the fort and found the boxes as MacWilliams had described them. Tenmen, with some effort, could lift and carry the larger coffin-shapedboxes, and Clay guessed that, granting their contents to be rifles,there must be a hundred pieces in each box, and that there were athousand rifles in all.
They had moved half of the boxes to the side of the track when thetrain of flat cars and the two engines came crawling and twistingtoward them, between the walls of the jungle, like a great serpent,with no light about it but the glow from the hot ashes as they fellbetween the rails. Thirty men, equally divided between Irish andnegroes, fell off the flat cars before the wheels had ceased torevolve, and, without a word of direction, began loading the heavyboxes on the train and passing the kegs of cartridges from hand to handand shoulder to shoulder. The sailors spread out up the road that ledto the Capital to give warning in case the enemy approached, but theywere recalled before they had reason to give an alarm, and in a halfhour Burke's entire shipment of arms was on the ore-cars, the men whowere to have guarded them were prisoners in the cab of the engine, andboth trains were rushing at
full speed toward the mines. On arrivingthere Kirkland's train was switched to the siding that led to themagazine in which was stored the rack-arock and dynamite used in theblasting. By midnight all of the boxes were safely under lock in thezinc building, and the number of the men who always guarded the placefor fear of fire or accident was doubled, while a reserve, composed ofKirkland's thirty picked men, were hidden in the surrounding houses andengine-sheds.
Before Clay left he had one of the boxes broken open, and found that itheld a hundred Mannlicher rifles.
"Good!" he said. "I'd give a thousand dollars in gold if I could bringMendoza out here and show him his own men armed with his ownMannlichers and dying for a shot at him. How old Burke will enjoy thiswhen he hears of it!"
The party from the Palms returned to their engine after many promisesof reward to the men for their work "over-time," and were soon flyingback with their hearts as light as the smoke above them.
MacWilliams slackened speed as they neared the fort, and moved upcautiously on the scene of their recent victory, but a warning cry fromClay made him bring his engine to a sharp stop. Many lights wereflashing over the ruins and they could see in their reflection thefigures of men running over the same walls on which the lizards hadbasked in undisturbed peace for years.
"They look like a swarm of hornets after some one has chucked a stonethrough their nest," laughed MacWilliams. "What shall we do now? Goback, or wait here, or run the blockade?"
"Oh, ride them out," said Langham; "the family's anxious, and I want totell them what's happened. Go ahead."
Clay turned to the sailors in the car behind them. "Lie down, men," hesaid. "And don't any of you fire unless I tell you to. Let them doall the shooting. This isn't our fight yet, and, besides, they can'thit a locomotive standing still, certainly not when it's going at fullspeed."
"Suppose they've torn the track up?" said MacWilliams, grinning. "We'dlook sort of silly flying through the air."
"Oh, they've not sense enough to think of that," said Clay. "Besides,they don't know it was we who took their arms away, yet."
MacWilliams opened the throttle gently, and the train moved slowlyforward, gaining speed at each revolution of the wheels.
As the noise of its approach beat louder and louder on the air, a yellof disappointed rage and execration rose into the night from the fort,and a mass of soldiers swarmed upon the track, leaping up and down andshaking the rifles in their hands.
"That sounds a little as though they thought we had something to dowith it," said MacWilliams, grimly. "If they don't look out some onewill get hurt."
There was a flash of fire from where the mass of men stood, followed bya dozen more flashes, and the bullets rattled on the smokestack andupon the boiler of the engine.
"Low bridge," cried MacWilliams, with a fierce chuckle. "Now, watchher!"
He threw open the throttle as far as it would go, and the engineanswered to his touch like a race-horse to the whip. It seemed tospring from the track into the air. It quivered and shook like a livething, and as it shot in between the soldiers they fell back on eitherside, and MacWilliams leaned far out of his cab-window shaking his fistat them.
"You got left, didn't you?" he shouted. "Thank you for theMannlichers."
As the locomotive rushed out of the jungle, and passed the point on theroad nearest to the Palms, MacWilliams loosened three long triumphantshrieks from his whistle and the sailors stood up and cheered.
"Let them shout," cried Clay. "Everybody will have to know now. It'sbegun at last," he said, with a laugh of relief.
"And we took the first trick," said MacWilliams, as he ran his engineslowly into the railroad yard.
The whistles of the engine and the shouts of the sailors had carriedfar through the silence of the night, and as the men came hurryingacross the lawn to the Palms, they saw all of those who had been leftbehind grouped on the veranda awaiting them.
"Do the conquering heroes come?" shouted King.
"They do," young Langham cried, joyously. "We've got all their arms,and they shot at us. We've been under fire!"
"Are any of you hurt?" asked Miss Langham, anxiously, as she and theothers hurried down the steps to welcome them, while those of the'Vesta's' crew who had been left behind looked at their comrades withenvy.
"We have been so frightened and anxious about you," said Miss Langham.
Hope held out her hand to Clay and greeted him with a quiet, happysmile, that was in contrast to the excitement and confusion thatreigned about them.
"I knew you would come back safely," she said. And the pressure of herhand seemed to add "to me."