Read Ebook: Harper's Round Table November 26 1895 by Various

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PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1895. FIVE CENTS A COPY.

IN FRONT OF A SPANISH CRUISER.

BY WILLIAM DRYSDALE.

"An hour's sport with a Spanish cruiser--that's what it will be," Benito Bastian said to himself.

Benito is a handsome dark-eyed Cuban boy, who lives on the little Cuban island called Ginger Key, forty miles north of the Cuban coast. The boys of Ginger Key, like their older brothers, are full of excitement just now; for occasionally a band of Cuban patriots makes its way over from Florida and goes into hiding in the thick woods, and watches its chance to land on the coast of Cuba. These hands need guides; and it is the Ginger Key boys who know the waters well, and the coast too. Benito handles his sharpie to perfection on the darkest nights and in all kinds of weather; and as to helping his countrymen, the Cuban insurgents, he feels about it just as the Boston boys felt about Bunker Hill.

"I ought to be doing something for the cause," he said to himself several months ago. "It's a pity I'm only sixteen; they may think I am too young. But I know these waters as well as any man on the key."

He looked down regretfully at his bare feet and legs, for his trousers were rolled well up. He took off his old straw hat and smiled at it; but he could not see how his brown eyes flashed, nor how handsome his brown hair looked, waving in the wind. He is tall and strong for his age, and brown as a berry--not only from the sun, but by nature.

"Yes, they'll say I'm only a boy, that's sure," he continued; "so I must have my wits about me if I want to get a chance."

"You don't get away very fast," he said to the leader, taking care to speak in a low voice. "It's ticklish work, landing men near Sagua la Grande. That's well watched."

The man looked at him curiously, surprised that this boy should know so much about his arrangements.

"I think I could draw her off long enough for you to land your men," Benito whispered.

"You?" the man exclaimed; "why, you are only a boy!" It was just as Benito expected.

He went on to unfold the plan he had made; and it was a plan so full of daring and danger that the man opened his eyes wide.

"That's easy," Benito answered. "What shall I bring you?"

The man thought a moment. "Bring me a bunch of red bananas," he answered. "They are plenty in Cuba, but you raise only yellow ones on this key. If you bring me a bunch of red bananas, I will know that you have been in Cuba."

Forty-eight hours later Benito laid a bunch of red bananas in the leader's tent, and gave him some valuable information about the movements of the cruiser.

"I think you'll do," said the man. "You are not all talk and no action, like some of these fellows. If you can draw the cruiser off and keep her out of our way for two hours, you are worthy to call yourself a Cuban."

"Very good," Benito answered. "I will try."

They talked over the details of the plan, and agreed that they must wait for a pitch-dark night and a brisk wind. On the morning that Benito scraped his boat, there was every promise of such a night. There would be no moon, the sky was overcast, and a lively breeze came in from the southeast.

"We will give you a line and tow you over," said the leader.

"One thing I must ask you," were the leader's last words before he went on board the schooner--"do your father and mother know what danger you are going into to-night?"

"I have no father or mother," Benito replied, sadly; "so if I don't come back it will not make much difference."

None knew better than he the risk he was taking. The cruiser would blow him out of the water if she could; and if any of them were captured, they would either be shot or be sentenced by the Spaniards to long terms of imprisonment.

The night was all they could ask, and just what they had waited for. No moon, the sky full of black clouds to obscure the stars, and half a gale blowing from the southeast. Benito was willing to risk his life on the sharpie being a faster boat than the Spanish cruiser on such a night.

Neither schooner nor sharpie showed a light; and if Benito had been captured on the way over his captors would have been astonished at the cargo he carried. In the bottom of his boat were a dozen boards, each two feet long by a foot wide, with a shallow tin can nailed to the middle of each board. And there were four canisters of colored fire--one red, one yellow, one green, and one white. And there were several yards of fuse, and a box of sand. The colored fire and the fuse Benito had bought when he visited Cuba for the bananas.

"The schooner is to lie to as soon as we sight the lights on the Cuban coast," was the arrangement Benito made with the leader. "After I find the cruiser you will see her lights moving; but she will be nearer to me than to you. I will give you a white light when all is safe. When I burn a white light you can land your men."

"So much the better," said Benito, when he boarded the schooner for a moment before setting his dangerous plot in motion. "I will coax her down to the eastward."

The leader of the party gave him a warm grip of the hand before they parted.

"You are a brave lad," said he. "When you are under the cruiser's fire, remember that it is in the cause of freedom."

"Oh, I don't think they can hit me," Benito answered; "and I am sure they can't catch me." And he was off.

The schooner and the sharpie had this great advantage; they could see the cruiser's lights, but she could not see them.

Benito beat down the coast till he was about five miles to the eastward of the cruiser, and several miles from the shore. Then he took up one of his boards with the shallow tin can nailed to it.

He poured sand into the can till it was about two-thirds full, and then put in a good inch of red fire. Through a little hole that he had punched in the side of the can he inserted the end of a full half-yard of fuse, and wound it round and round the can, and tied it with a cord to keep it out of the water. Cautiously he struck a match under the stern seat and touched it to the fuse, and laid the board on the surface of the water and left it floating there.

This done, he headed the sharpie for shore. The long fuse was used because he desired to be close under the shore before the red fire burned. The southeast wind was just right for him, and the sharpie fairly flew through the water. He was close enough in, and was pouring sand into the second can fastened to a board, when the red light blazed up.

What a glare it made! Certainly that lurid light must be visible for twenty miles.

It was green fire that Benito poured into his second can, and for this he used a much shorter fuse--just long enough to give him time to escape from the circle of light that was sure to follow. The red fire had hardly died out before the green fire blazed up, but by that time Benito was half a mile away.

"That will stir them up," he said to himself. The sharpie was making a long run to the northeast then, seaward and away from the cruiser; but he kept an eye on her lights. "It's plain enough what that means. First the red light, a signal from a party about to land; then the green light, an answering signal from their friends on shore. At least that's what I want the cruiser to think, and I believe she will; and she'll hunt those lights."

"Ah!" he exclaimed, a moment later, "the cruiser has seen the lights, for she's moving. I've started her, sure. Now the excitement begins."

The cruiser's lights grew larger and larger. She was standing down the coast, almost straight toward the green light, which still burned. She ran up within a half-mile of it, and fire belched from one of her turrets.

C-r-a-s-h! crash! Not one great boom, but a continuous roar.

"That's her Gatling!" Benito exclaimed. "Lucky I didn't burn my lights on the boat, as I thought of doing."

The green light disappeared under the shower of bullets, and the cruiser kept on her course. That was against the wind, and the sharpie could not compete with steam against the wind; but Benito was heading out seaward, off to the northeast, further and further away from the schooner.

"All right, Spaniard!" Benito exclaimed. He had never been under fire before, and his lips were set firm, and his free hand involuntarily closed into a tight fist. "All right, Spaniard! I've got you waked up, anyhow. You're chasing a party of insurgents, ain't you! I wish I dared tell you that you're chasing a boy, while the insurgents are getting ready to land ten miles up the coast!"

He stood in for the shore again, still beating to the eastward as close as the wind would allow; and when the fuse's spark blazed up into a bright red light the cruiser was heading towards it.

"A little careful about showing this light; that's what I'll have to be; a little careful," he said to himself, as he struck a match to set off his second green light close to shore. He kept the sharpie between the spark of fuse and the cutter's lights as long as he could to hide the fire, and then stood out seaward to the northeast again.

As the green light blazed up he turned his head a moment to look at it, and in that instant a strange thing happened. When he looked towards the cruiser again she had disappeared! Save for the green fire burning there was not a spark of light on all that black sea.

"I thought she'd do that!" Benito exclaimed. "She's trying my own game, and has put out all her lights. Well, I'll give her a white light in a few minutes, and that will be something new for her to think about."

He was still running out seaward and eastward, and the sharpie was bending down to her work, and cutting the waves like a knife, when suddenly he heard the throbbing of an engine and the splash of a propeller. Before he had time to think a great black wall of iron, looming twenty feet above his head, was right on top of him.

The cruiser was accidentally running him down in the darkness! He could see nothing on the water, but there was light enough in the sky to make out her great black form towering over him. His first impulse was to cry out; but he shut his teeth tight and waited for the blow.

But the blow did not come. The next instant the black mass was shooting past him, her iron side hardly six feet from the sharpie's stern.

"Good sharpie! Good old girl!" he exclaimed; and in the excitement he patted the boat on the gunwale. "If you hadn't been a flier, we'd been goners that time."

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