The Spanish Whip
Dennis had given up the idea of building a boat as a means of escape
from the island; but now that time again hung heavy on his hands, he
reverted to it as a refuge from the tedium of idleness. It promised to
give him much labour, for, unless he stripped the planking from the
_Maid Marian_, he must needs fell trees for himself, and prepare his
timbers as well as his unskill could devise. The trees of the island
were for the most part unknown to him; and he was not aware of the
Indian practice of hollowing out a cedar trunk with fire or hatchet.
In his wanderings he now began to take note of the different species,
with a view to selecting one that would best suit his tools.
One day, when he was strolling through the woodland on this errand, he
was amazed, and not a little alarmed, to hear, from some spot far to
his right, what seemed to him to be the ring of axes. He halted,
incredulous. The island, he was assured, had no other inhabitant; yet
he could not be mistaken; the sound of tree-felling reminded him of
home, and he felt a sudden deep yearning for the combes and holts of
far-off Devon. But this feeling was immediately quelled by a sense of
danger. Who were these woodcutters? No friends, he was sure; he had
given up hope of finding friends upon these remote coasts. And if not
friends, discovery by these spelt death to him, or slavery to which
death would be preferable.
He was minded to turn about and seek safety in his hut. Built upon the
edge of the chine, it could only be discovered by careful exploration
of the woodland, and the chine was all but invisible from the sea.
There he might remain in hiding, with a fair chance that he would not
be found. But this first impulse passed. He felt an overmastering
curiosity to see who these visitors were. Whence had they come, he
wondered? Why, if they came from the distant mainland, had they
crossed the sea? He could not suppose that wood was lacking upon the
shores of the great continent.
Slowly, with infinite caution, he began to thread his way towards the
sound. There were open spaces amid the woodland; these he durst not
cross, but kept always in the shelter of the trees. He dreaded lest
Mirandola should betray him by a cry; but the monkey leapt from bough
to bough almost noiselessly, as if he too had taken alarm from the
unwonted sound. A few weeks before, Dennis himself would have found it
difficult to make his way through the woods and the undergrowth without
giving signs of his presence by the snapping of twigs or the rustle of
parting foliage; but the abiding sense of danger which had oppressed
him during his earlier passages across the island had bred in him a
wariness of movement that was now almost as instinctive as in the wild
creatures whose lives depended on their caution.
Guiding himself by the sounds, he was drawn towards a grove of trees
that lay about two hundred yards from the southern beach. Only a day
or two before he had struck his hatchet into one of them, and concluded
from its soft white sappy rind that it would not provide fit timber for
his boat. Yet it was clearly these trees upon which the unseen woodmen
were at work. He stole forward, and coming to a dense fringe of
undergrowth beyond which the grove lay, he edged his way into the
thicket, and very stealthily pressed the foliage aside until he got a
view of what was doing.
The trees grew somewhat far apart, and across a fairly open space he
saw the strangers whose unexpected presence was causing him such
concern. Five men, stripped to the waist, were hard at work with axes.
Four of them had dusky skins of reddish hue; the fifth, a short,
thickset, brawny man, the muscles of whose arms showed like great
globes, was clearly a white man, though his hands and arms were stained
a bright scarlet quite different from the red duskiness of southern
natives, or the red-brown caused by exposure to sun and wind. As they
moved, the five men clanked the chains that fettered their ankles to
stout logs of wood. A little apart stood three men looking on,
laughing and talking together in a tongue strange to Dennis. They were
big swarthy fellows, with soft wide-brimmed hats, each decked with a
feather, brown leather doublets and hose, and long boots. Each bore a
caliver and a whip.
The sun was high in the heavens, its beams beating down through the
trees upon the unprotected backs of the toilers. Sweat was pouring
from them. The trees were thick, some at least two yards in
circumference; to cut them through needed no slight exertion. The
white labourer paused to draw his arm across his reeking brow. Then
one of the watchers strolled across from the tree against which he had
been lolling, and raising his whip, brought the thong with a stinging
cut across the back of the slave who had dared to intermit his labours.
A red streak showed livid on the white skin. For a moment it seemed to
Dennis, watching the scene, that the victim was about to turn upon his
assailant with the axe, his sole weapon. An expression of deadly rage
writhed the features of his red, bearded face. His grip tightened upon
the axe. But he controlled his impulse with an effort. The warder
laughed brutally, flung a taunt, and cracked his whip in the air in
challenge and menace. Sullenly the woodman resumed his task, and his
persecutor, with another laugh, turned and rejoined his companions,
applauded by their grins.
Dennis felt himself stung to anger. This swarthy ruffian, he doubted
not, was a Spaniard, a subject of King Philip, once the consort of an
English queen. It was not a pleasant introduction to the race
dominating the Americas. Apparently Mirandola liked them no better
than he, for at the first sight of the strangers the monkey had fled
away. Dennis found him a good quarter-mile distant when, taking
advantage of an interval during which the Spaniards ate and drank, and
the flagging toilers rested, he strode away to a banana grove to
refresh himself.
He watched the group till near sundown. Several trees having been
felled, the men proceeded to hack off the branches and to chip away the
white rind. Then the strange scarlet colour of their arms and hands
was explained. The heart of the trees was a brilliant red. As the
rind was stripped off, the Spaniards drew near and examined the core,
and under their direction the labourers cut and trimmed certain
selected logs. The work was still unfinished when the sun went down,
and the leader of the Spaniards gave the word for returning to the
shore. The logs were struck off the slaves' ankles and replaced by
manacles; then they set off. Dennis followed them at a safe distance,
and when he came within view of the sea, there was a small vessel
riding at anchor some little distance off shore, and the slaves were in
the act of dragging a row boat through the white surf. In this they
all put off, and darkness covered them up as they regained the ship.
Dennis returned to his hut, joined by the monkey on the way.
"Here is food for thought, Mirandola, my friend," he said. "No fire
for us to-night! Are you acquainted with don Spaniards and their ways?
You kept a wide berth: have you too suffered at their hands? Who is
the poor wretch the ruffian lashed? By his looks he would pass for an
Englishman: I hope he is not of English breed. Yet I hope he is: what
do you make of that, Mirandola? I protest I love your wise and
friendly countenance; but there is something warming to the heart in
the sight of one of my own kind, if such he be. We must be up betimes,
my friend; maybe the morrow will give us assurance."
Thinking over the incident before he slept, Dennis wondered why the
party had returned to the ship. If the purpose of their visit was to
obtain any quantity of this strange red wood, doubtless they had
several days' work before them; why had they not camped on shore?
Perhaps they felt that the slaves were safer on board; perhaps, too,
they did not care to weaken the ship's company during the hours of
night. It was a small vessel; probably there was not a large number of
Spaniards aboard; but doubtless they were all armed like the three who
had come ashore, and their slaves, being fettered, would need but a few
to control them. Dennis hoped that when they returned next day they
would not make too thorough a search for similar groves elsewhere in
the island, for if they should discover his hut, he had little doubt
they would seek to impress him into the hapless gang.
His sleep was restless. Many times he woke with a start and sprang up
trembling, feeling that the Spaniards were on his track. At daybreak
he was on his way towards the western shore, and took up his position
in the same thicket, the leafy screen being almost impenetrable. The
monkey was with him now; but when his ears caught first the measured
thud of oars, then the clank of chains drawing nearer, Mirandola
chattered angrily, sprang into a tree, and disappeared.
The party came into view: five slaves, three Spaniards. The former
were, to all appearance, the same as those Dennis had seen on the
previous day; but it seemed to him that their armed guards were
different; probably the men of the ship took it in turns to come
ashore. But if the individuals were different, their methods were much
the same. Indeed, before Dennis had been watching the work many
minutes, he had reason to know that the warders of to-day were even
more ingeniously brutal than those of yesterday. The first thing he
noticed was a change in their manner of rendering their slaves
harmless. One of them carried a large wooden mallet; the others had
between them iron staples with sharp-pointed ends. These staples they
drove one by one with the mallet into the boles of the five trees
selected for the day's operations. Secured to each staple was one end
of a long chain, the other end of which was fastened to the captive's
ankle band. Thus the hapless woodmen were fettered not merely by the
logs of wood, as on the previous day, but by chains that bound them to
the very trees they were to cut down. The staples were driven into the
trunks below the line of the cleft to be made; but the chains, though
long, seemed to Dennis scarcely long enough to enable the men to escape
crushing should the trees happen to fall the wrong way. That was a
chance which evidently did not trouble the guards.
Dennis wondered why this additional precaution had been taken to ensure
the safe custody of the wretched men. Had they shown signs of mutiny?
It would not be surprising after the treatment of the previous day.
Certainly the ingenious device lightened the task of surveillance, for
the wood-cutters, however exasperated, could not turn upon their guards
until they had forced out the staples with their axes.
The three Spaniards threw themselves down at some distance from the
slaves and lolled negligently against the trees. The wood-cutters
plied their axes, sturdily, monotonously, never speaking, their faces
expressing nothing but a sullen despair. Dennis fixed his eyes on the
white man, and felt an eager longing to hear him speak. One word would
be enough to show whether he was indeed an Englishman. But the man was
as silent as the rest, and nothing was heard save the ring of the axes
and the voices of the Spaniards conversing.
Five trees lay upon the ground; the warders rose to drive the staples
into others. It appeared that time hung heavy on their hands. Some
demon of mischief suggested to one of them a means of obtaining a
little diversion. His proposal was received with shouts of laughter by
his companions. Dennis did not understand what was said, but the
meaning was soon made plain. The three men drew lots with three twigs
of unequal length, and placed themselves by the side of three
slaves--the white man and two Indians--as fate determined. Again they
drew lots, and proceeded to fasten their men to three new trees. The
other two Indians were set to strip the trunks already felled. It was
soon evident that the Spaniards' amusement was to be had at the expense
of the wood-cutters. They pooled a number of pieces of eight; the
Spaniard whose man first felled his tree was to take the stakes.
The three men set to work, the warders standing over them with their
whips. The faces of the Indians wore their wonted look of dull apathy;
but Dennis saw the lips of the white man tighten, and a grim scowl
darken his brow. The sport commenced. Excited by their gamble, the
Spaniards urged on their men with loud cries. For some minutes the two
Indians smote the trees with feverish energy; the white man plied his
axe with measured strokes, neither slower nor faster than before. The
warders became more and more excited, and from cries proceeded to
blows. One of the Indians flagged, and to stimulate him the Spaniard
behind dealt him a savage blow with his whip, and the poor cowed wretch
laid on with greater vigour. Hidden in the bush Dennis nervously
clutched his sword and felt the blood surge into his cheeks. Fine
sport, indeed! The other Spaniards, not to be outdone, began to
belabour the backs of their men also, and Dennis, seeing great weals
rise on the bare flesh, could scarcely control the impulse to dash at
all costs from his hiding-place to the aid of the suffering men. He
saw the face of the white man pale beneath the sun-tan and the red
stains; perchance the Spaniard would have had a qualm if he had seen
the fury his features expressed. But he did not see it; with callous
levity he shouted, and brought his whip down with a sickening crack
upon the broad red-streaked back.
Then, with a suddenness that took Dennis's breath away, the white man's
pent-up rage burst its bounds. At the end of his endurance, he swung
round with a nimbleness surprising in a man of his bulk, and flung his
axe with unerring aim at his tormentor. The man fell among the logs.
In a second, before the other Spaniards had time to recover from the
shock of this unheard-of audacity, one of the Indians at work on the
fallen tree hurled his weapon at the warder nearest him, and struck him
headlong to the ground. The third man had sufficient command of his
wits to take to his heels and scamper away.
The wood-cutters were between him and the shore, and the direction of
his flight was towards the thicket in which Dennis stood, all tingling
with the excitement of this amazing change of scene. He gripped his
sword; but the Spaniard stopped short within a few yards of the bushes,
uttered a furious oath, and turning about, kindled his match, preparing
to shoot at the slaves, who were hacking with frenzied haste at the
staples that held them to the trees. The two Indians who were free
were hobbling towards the woodland on the other side, appalled by their
own temerity. Dennis heard the Spaniard chuckle as he raised his
caliver. The man knew full well that, even if the woodmen succeeded in
breaking loose, he would have time to shoot them down one by one,
hobbled as they were.
Dennis could no longer remain inactive. An enemy of the Spaniards,
whatever his colour, was a friend of his. He could not see the poor
wretches slaughtered. For an instant he thought of kindling his own
match and firing at the Spaniard, who was within easy range. Then,
changing his mind, he pushed aside the bushes, sprang into the open,
and leapt over the ground with the lightness of a panther. The
Spaniard heard his movements and swung round; Dennis saw the startled
look of terror in his eyes. Taken aback, he had no time to ward off
the musket stock of this assailant who had sprung as it were out of the
earth. His cry of alarm was stifled in his throat, and under the blow
dealt him with all the force of honest rage he dropped senseless to the
ground.