usac would certainly have adopted that course if only his men had
been unanimous in the matter. They, however, were torn between greed and
apprehension. If they went they must abandon their share of the plunder,
which was considerable, as well as the slaves and other prisoners
they had taken. If they did this, and Captain Blood should afterwards
contrive to get away unscathed--and from their knowledge of his
resourcefulness, the thing, however unlikely, need not be impossible--he
must profit by that which they now relinquished. This was a contingency
too bitter for contemplation. And so, in the end, despite all that
Cahusac could say, the surrender was not to Don Miguel, but to Peter
Blood. They had come into the venture with him, they asserted, and
they would go out of it with him or not at all. That was the message
he received from them that same evening by the sullen mouth of Cahusac
himself.

He welcomed it, and invited the Breton to sit down and join the council
which was even then deliberating upon the means to be employed. This
council occupied the spacious patio of the Governor's house--which
Captain Blood had appropriated to his own uses--a cloistered stone
quadrangle in the middle of which a fountain played coolly under a
trellis of vine. Orange-trees grew on two sides of it, and the still,
evening air was heavy with the scent of them. It was one of those
pleasant exterior-interiors which Moorish architects had introduced to
Spain and the Spaniards had carried with them to the New World.

Here that council of war, composed of six men in all, deliberated until
late that night upon the plan of action which Captain Blood put forward.

The great freshwater lake of Maracaybo, nourished by a score of rivers
from the snow-capped ranges that surround it on two sides, is some
hundred and twenty miles in length and almost the same distance across
at its widest. It is--as has been indicated--in the shape of a great
bottle having its neck towards the sea at Maracaybo.

Beyond this neck it widens again, and then the two long, narrow strips
of land known as the islands of Vigilias and Palomas block the channel,
standing lengthwise across it. The only passage out to sea for vessels
of any draught lies in the narrow strait between these islands. Palomas,
which is some ten miles in length, is unapproachable for half a mile
on either side by any but the shallowest craft save at its eastern end,
where, completely commanding t