ouse, John Drake and Oxenham had burst open the
doors of the store-room just as the saddled mules came galloping to
carry the booty beyond danger. A lighted candle on the cellar stair
showed silver piled bar on bar to the value of one million pounds.
Down on the market, the English trumpeter lay dead. Drake had fallen
from a sword slash and, snatched up by comrades, the wound stanched by
a scarf, was carried back to the boat, where the raiders made good
their escape, richer by a million pounds with the loss of only one man.

{143} Drake cruised the Spanish Main for six more months. From the
Indians he learned that the mule trains with the yearly output of
Peruvian gold would leave the Pacific in midwinter to cross overland to
Nombre de Dios. No use trying to raid the fort again! Spain would not
be caught napping a second time. But Pedro, a Panama Indian, had
volunteered to guide a small band of lightly equipped English inland
behind Nombre de Dios, to the halfway house where the gold caravans
stopped. The audacity of the project is unparalleled. Eighteen boys
led by a man not yet in his thirtieth year accompanied by Indians were
to invade a tangled thicket of hostile country, cut off from retreat,
the forts of the enemy--the cruelest enemy in Christendom--on each
side, no provisions but what each carried in his haversack!

Led by the Indian Pedro, the freebooters struck across country, picked
up the trail behind Nombre de Dios, marched by night, hid by day,
Indian scouts sending back word when a Spaniard was seen, the English
scudding to ambush in the tangled woods. Twelve days and nights they
marched. At ten in the morning of February 11, they were on the Great
Divide. Pedro led Drake to the top of the hill. Up the trunk of an
enormous tree, the Indians had cut steps to a kind of bower, or
lookout. Up clambered Francis Drake. Then he looked westward.

Mountains, hills, forested valleys, rolled from his feet westward.
Beyond--what? The shining {144} expanse of the fabled South Sea! The
Pacific silver in the morning light! A New World of Waters, where the
sun's track seemed to pave a new path, a path of gold, to the mystic
Orient! Never before had English eyes seen these waters! Never yet
English prow cut these waves! Where did they lead--the endlessly
rolling billows? For Drake, they seemed to lead to a New World of
Dreams--dreams of gold, of glory, of immortal fame. He came down from
the lookout