by Robert Adams
The comandante of the fortress and town at Boca Osa was not in the least pleased to be forced to afford lodging to armed troops of the excommunicant French trespassers, still less to courteously entertain their snobbish officers, some of whom he recognized anyway as men he and his expeditionary force had driven out of this very town after their suicidal commander had blown up the French fort with him in it. But the Cuban guarda costa caravel that had come up the river with the two French warship-troopships had borne along a letter from His Excellency in Habana ordering cooperation and straitly forbidding any violence against the French unless they first should unmistakably demonstrate hostile intent or treachery, so Don Guillermo and his officers were left no option save to swallow their true feelings, ethnic prejudice, and basic distrust and behave as if the French interlopers were really friendly allies.
At the obligatory formal meal on the second evening after the arrival of these infamously cunning confreres, Don Guillermo sat as host, trying to be politely jovial to these men he hated while at the same time riding tight, glowering herd on his own hot-blooded officers lest one of them say or do that which their instincts and his own all called insistently to be done, in all of its violence and bloodshed.
While Capitaine Sieur Maurice Maria de Mont Souris picked with a look of clear disdain at a fowl—reeking of garlic and spices and yellow-orange with saffron—Don Guillermo, to whom had quickly been reported the Frenchman's prying about every nook and cranny of the fort, while an accompanying aide had rendered sketches and noted armaments, asked, "And what does my lord think of our Castillo de San Diego, in the wake of his thorough inspection tour?"
Sieur Maurice Maria sniffed, shrugged Gallically, and said in a coolish tone, "When it was called the Fort of Saint Denis, I recall it being much cleaner." After a lone, insulting pause, he smiled icily and added, "Architecturally speaking, of course. The walls are thick enough and adequately inclined, but is it to be held for long, it needs heavier ordnance; why, my good ship out yonder mounts cannon throwing half again as much poundage as your heaviest and long culverins throwing four or five pounds more than your largest. You never could last long here under a serious bombardment from a fleet of modern ships such as my Indomptable. Thick as are your walls here, it is to be expected that they would not remain long of solid fabric battered with seventy-pound iron shot."
Don Felipe, but just days before returned from a scouting mission upriver, had opened his mouth to make a heated reply, but a hard look from Don Guillermo silenced him, his rejoinder to ever remain unspoken.
But each and every one of them was, all too soon, to recall the words that had been spoken.
Arsen and Mike skimmed down the river in their carriers, well up above the thick fog until just before the last turn, when they sank down into the damp and chilly embrace of the soup-thick mists and proceeded more slowly toward the faint yellow glow of the lantern hung at the masthead of the largest ship, where she lay at anchor in the channel of the Rio Oso.
Unknown to them, a sentry on the river wall of the fort—one of the reinforcements for the garrison sent up aboard the Cuban ship and standing his first tour of guard duty at his new posting—saw and called the attention of his passing superior to the greenish glows moving through the bank of fog.
"Sarjento? Sarjento, look, see, out yonder! What could they be, river monsters of some kind?"
The sergeant, also just up from his own former posting at the Castillo de San Marcos, many leagues south of Boca Osa, snorted and said, "Hardly, you ignorant Creole scum! I've seen almost the same as that fog over water at San Agostino, and an officer down there—a most learned Moor—told me that in many swamps, the peat ferments and that from that fermenting peat, a thick gas rises up and the winds carry clouds of it over water and out to sea. For some reason we do not understand, God causes this gas to often glow, just like those two blobs out there. The officer said that the substance is called 'swamp gas.'"
"Now stop seeing monsters in the river and keep your eyes set on that damned French ship. Remember what you were told earlier—at the first sight of anything suspicious aboard her, you're to fire your arquebus to alarm the fort."
When Mike Sikeena had adroitly and silently clubbed down the two sentries on the foredeck and the quarterdeck, both he and Arsen guided their opened carriers along the rank of iron guns positioned in the waist of the ship, unplugging touchholes, filling these holes with fine priming powder from flasks they carried, then going on to the next gun, not stopping until all of the larboard deck guns had been primed to fire. Next they glided far enough to the starboard side to be out of any danger in case a gun burst and began using the carrier heat-rods to touch off the guns. Because they had not remembered to remove the tompions from the muzzles or even to open the gunports, the iron balls and belching fire from the discharging guns wrought a goodly amount of damage to the ship's larboard rails, and because the tubes had not been aimed at all, only three of the balls struck any part of the fort, one plowed into the Cuban guarda costa where she lay moored at the dockside, and the other two landed in the town.
While the fort resounded with the peal of bugles, the rattle of drums, and the occasional windborne shout in Spanish, Moorish, or some other tongue, Arsen and Mike used their heat-rods to burn through every bit of rigging they passed for the length of the ship, then parted the anchor chains before heading back into the fog, into the night, and back upriver. For miles of their trip, as they moved slowly in the still-opened carriers, they could hear the distant thunder of cannon from the area they just had left.
Naturally, they could not know just how much chaos they really had wrought. One of the lines they had severed had been that by which the big lantern had been hoist to and held at the masthead, and when it came plunging down on deck, it had smashed and the oil spreading out from it had been fired by the still-lit wick to confront the crewmen and officers who came spilling out from the passages with an immediate concern that, for the moment, occupied them so thoroughly that they did not at once notice the fact that the ship was no longer secured by its anchor and was drifting with the river current, stern-foremost, down toward the treacherous bars and mud-banks just above the mouth of the Rio Oso.
Don Guillermo came to the top of the ramparts huffing with the exertion of racing so fast up so many steps. He was wearing only his small clothes, boots, a purple-plumed morion, and a baldric. His hair, beard and mustachios were tousled and disordered, but his wheel-lock dag was spanned and primed and his sword blade was bared.
"What the hell is afoot?" he yelled at the nearest officer, one of the new ones sent up from Cuba. "Did the French pigs fire on us?"
The young officer waved out at the mist-shrouded river and said excitedly, "They did, Comandante, they loosed off every deck gun that would bear and now they've cut loose their anchor and are headed downriver . . . although there appears to be a fire aboard, no sails have been set, and they are going stern-foremost, it would appear. It is most peculiar."
"The French are always most peculiar, man," snapped the fort commander. "Not to mention their inborn treachery and total lack of honor." At sight of one of his original officers, he roared, "Don Anselmo, my compliments to Maestro Pablo, and tell him to hull that French scow before she gets beyond range. I'll teach that foppish bastard to fire on the fort of a sleeping ally! And have the whole garrison formed up, fully armed. So anxious was that French turd to strike at us that he forgot a half-hundred of his soldiers were either ashore or aboard that coaster of his moored at the dock. Not one of them is to escape alive. Hear me, man?"
Aboard the caravel Indomptable, the Sieur de Mont Souris, less fully dressed than Don Guillermo, demanded of the sailing master, "How the hell did this fire start? And who was the one responsible for firing off those guns?"
"Monsieur, I do not know how the guns were fired. Whoever did it first struck down the deck guards. But the fire apparently was started by the masthead lantern falling into the waist. Also, the anchor chains somehow
parted and the ship is drifting with the current," replied that harried seaman.
"Then, you numbskull, get the sails unfurled, ere my beautiful ship be driven onto a mud-bank!" the Sieur shrieked in rage.
"Monsieur, it would appear that the fire or something has parted too much of the standing rigging. I would be fearful of sending men up to add their weights to those masts or to put the strain of drawing sails on them until the rigging be repaired."
"Well, then, damn your worm-ridden guts, you Gascon cur-dog, man a boat and send a messenger ashore to the fort before those Spanish clods and the braying jackass who commands them decide they've been deliberately attacked and return fire. Have you no brain of your own? Must your betters always think for you?"
But it was too late. The stricken Cuban guarda costa, her rudder smashed and her hull holed by the third cannon's twelve-pound ball, carefully aimed her stern-chaser—the only gun that now would bear on the slowly moving French caravel, a long demiculverin—and spat out a nine-pound iron sphere that crashed its way through the brightly painted rail of the quarterdeck, throwing deadly splinters of wood in every direction, then took off the leg of one of the men trying to force the rudder about, before caroming off the base of the mizzenmast and splashing into the river.
But the worst was yet to come. The first scream of the crippled seaman still was ringing in the damp air when the entire river wall of the Castillo de San Diego belched forth long, thick spears of flame from first the lower, then the upper batteries. Sieur Maurice Maria de Mont Souris, however, was never aware of what the balls hurled by the "mere forty-pounder" cannon he had derided earlier wrought upon his beautiful ship, for one of the splinters hurled from the rail had pierced through his eye and deep into his head, forever ending his abilities to think for his inferiors.