The day’s heat had come like a breath of fever, heavy and dully bewildering. The songs from the barges thickened and died as though hot blankets had been thrown over the men. The buccaneers sat lifelessly on their benches. But the straining Indians poled on with a steady, swinging motion. The muscles slipped along their fine arms, coiled and uncoiled about their shoulders like restless serpents. Within their brooding brains was a reverie of slaughter, a delightful blood dream. “On!” said their brains. “On! Ugh! the battle is two strides nearer. On! On! Ugh! Panama; the savannas of blood are two strides nearer.” The long line of boats writhed up the river like a tremendous jointed snake.
The long ardent day fell back toward evening, and no human had been seen along the river banks. This was a serious matter, for there was no food in the barges. There was no room for food. Every inch was needed for men and weapons. As it was, the water washed over the low decks of the artillery rafts. It was well known that many plantations bordered the river, whereat a hungry army might refresh itself, and this knowledge had sent the pirates foodless toward Panama. All day they had watched for the plantation and had seen nothing but the green tangled jungle.
In the evening, the first boat came abreast of a landing of sticks. A languid coil of smoke rose from behind a planted row of tall trees. With loud cries of joy, the buccaneers leaped from their boats and waded to the shore. Curses and despair; the buildings were burned and deserted. This little smoke drifted from the black heap of what had been a granary, in which no single grain remained for the men to eat. Deep tracks led off into the wet jungle to show where the cattle had been driven away, but the tracks were two days old.
The hungry men went back to their boats. Ah, well; they must go hungry today. Hunger was a part of war, a matter to be expected and endured. Tomorrow, surely, they would come on houses where wine was stored, cold and delicious; corrals where fat cows nodded stupidly, waiting to be slaughtered. A buccaneer—a true buccaneer—would sell out his life for a cup of sour wine or a bit of converse with one of the brown women of half-Spain. These were the joys of life, and a fair thing it was if the man were stabbed before he finished his drink or his conversation; but hunger—Well, tomorrow there would be food surely.
But again the sun arose, a white, fevered ulcer in the sky. There was the river of mad turnings, and along its banks deserted farms, and no food at all. News of this invasion had swept along before them like an appalling message of pestilence. No man or animal remained to greet the buccaneers.
On the third day they found a number of tough green cow hides, and they beat them between stones to soften them for eating. Some of the men had eaten half their belts. Once a little burned maize was discovered in a still burning granary, and several of the pirates died in agony from gorging on it.
The men hunted in the jungle, searched through the trees for any living thing which might be eaten. Even the cats and monkeys seemed to be leagued with Spain. The jungle was silent and creatureless now. No unit of life was left save the flying insects. Now and then a snake was caught and roasted, while its captor sullenly guarded his supper. A few mice came into the pirates’ hands, but these were bolted on the spot for fear of thievery.
After four days of traveling, the river grew too shallow for the boats. The cannons were brought ashore to be dragged by manpower along a narrow path. The buccaneers straggled out in an unkempt column, while ahead of them a swarm of busy Indians, drawing energy from their sanguinary dream, hacked and slashed out the trail through the jungle with their heavy knives. A few small groups of fleeing Spaniards were seen, and now and again small bands of Spanish Indians flushed from the thickets like coveys of frightened quail, but no enemy paused long enough to give fight. Once, beside the trail, a prepared place of ambush was discovered; a wall of earth, and the ashes of many campfires. It was deserted. Terror had seized the soldiers sent to fight, and they had run away.
Now the men were dragging themselves nearer and nearer to Panama. Their enthusiasm for the conquest was gone; they cursed their leader for his failure to bring food; they were drawn farther and farther by the sheer force of the example of Captain Morgan.
From the first he had led them, but now, at the head of the exhausted troops, Henry Morgan himself was beginning to doubt whether he wished very greatly to go to Panama. He tried to remember the force which had started him on his way, the magnet of unseen beauty. La Santa Roja had faded in his imagination as his hunger grew. He could not clearly remember his desire. But even though this desire should desert him utterly, he must go on. One failure, one moment of indecision, would scatter his successes like pigeons.
Coeur de Gris was beside him as he had been from the beginning, a haggard Coeur de Gris now, who lurched a little as he walked.
