Page:Westward Ho! (1855).djvu/350

342 'Coming; my maid, coming!" and after that the dear chuck called no more—God grant I find her yet!—and so I woke."

Cary had long since given up laughing at Yeo about the "little maid;" and Amyas answered,—

"So let it be, Yeo, if the rest agree: but what shall we do to the westward?"

"Do?" said Cary; "there's plenty to do; for there's plenty of gold and plenty of Spaniards, too, they say, on the other side of these mountains: so that our swords will not rust for lack of adventures, my gay knights-errant all."

So they chattered on; and before night was half through a plan was matured, desperate enough—but what cared those brave hearts for that? They would cross the Cordillera to Santa Fé de Bogotá, of the wealth whereof both Yeo and Amyas had often heard in the Pacific: try to seize either the town or some convoy of gold going from it; make for the nearest river (there was said to be a large one which ran northward thence), build canoes, and try to reach the Northern Sea once more; and then, if Heaven prospered them, they might seize a Spanish ship, and make their way home to England, not, indeed, with the wealth of Manoa, but with a fair booty of Spanish gold. This was their new dream. It was a wild one: but hardly more wild than the one which Drake had fulfilled, and not as wild as the one which Oxenham might have fulfilled, but for his own fatal folly.

Amyas sat watching late that night, sad of heart. To give up the cherished dream of years was hard; to face his mother, harder still: but it must be done, for the men's sake. So the new plan was proposed next day, and accepted joyfully. They would go up to the mountains and rest awhile; if possible, bring up the wounded whom they had left behind; and then, try a new venture, with new hopes, perhaps new dangers; they were inured to the latter.

They started next morning cheerfully enough, and for three hours or more paddled easily up the glassy and windless reaches, between two green flower-bespangled walls of forest, gay with innumerable birds and insects; while down from the branches which overhung the stream long trailers hung to the water's edge, and seemed admiring in the clear mirror the images of their own gorgeous flowers. River, trees, flowers, birds, insects,—it was all a fairy-land; but it was a colossal one; and yet the voyagers took little note of it. It was now to them an everyday occurence, to see trees full two hundred feet high one mass of yellow or purple blossom to the highest twigs, and every branch and stem one hanging garden of crimson and orange orchids or vanillas. Common to them were all the fantastic and enormous shapes with which Nature bedecks her robes beneath the fierce suns and fattening rains of the tropic forest. Common were forms and colors of bird and fish, and butterfly, more strange and bright than ever opium-eater dreamed. The long processions of monkeys, who kept pace with them along the tree-tops, and