and attached a hawser to the lighter; and the cargo was on its way to Cuba.  Johnny O’Brien was on the tug.  The Laurada was met off Barnegat, as arranged, and the cargo and about fifty Cubans put on board of her.  She was ordered to proceed slowly to Navassa Island where the Dauntless would meet her.  General Nunez and O’Brien returned to New York on the tug, and while the detectives suspected that something had been done, they had no clue whatever to guide them.  Nunez and O’Brien started immediately for Charleston, with detectives at their heels.  The Commodore, a tug then owned by the Cubans, lay in the harbor of that city, with a revenue cutter standing guard over her.  She was ordered to get up steam and to go through all the motions of an immediate departure.  But this was a ruse to draw attention away from the actual operations.  Rubens, meanwhile, had gone to Jacksonville where he busied himself in convincing the authorities that the tug Three Friends was about to get away with an expedition.  With one revenue cutter watching the Commodore in Charleston, the other cutter in the neighborhood was engaged in watching the Three Friends in Jacksonville, thus leaving a clear coast between those cities.  In Charleston were about seventy-five Cubans waiting a chance to get to the island.  O’Brien states that about twenty-five detectives were following their party.  Late in the afternoon of August 13, while the smoke was pouring from the funnels of the Commodore, the regular south-bound train pulled out of the city.  Its rear car was a reserved coach carrying the Cuban party, numbering a hundred or so.  Detectives tried to enter, but were told that it was a private car, which it was.  They went along in the forward cars.  At ten o’clock that night, the train reached Callahan, where the Coast Line crossed the Seaboard Air Line.  While the train was halted for the crossing, that rear car was quietly uncoupled.  The train went on, detectives and all.  The railroad arrangements were effected through the invaluable assistance of Mr. Alphonso Fritot, a local railway man whose authority enabled him to do with trains and train movement whatever he saw fit.  He was himself of Cuban birth, though of French-American parentage, with ample reason, both personal and patriotic, for serving his Cuban friends, and his services were beyond measure.  By his orders, when that train with its band of detectives had pulled away for Jacksonville, an engine picked up the detached car and ran it over to the Coast Line.  A few miles away, it collected from a blind siding the two cars of arms and ammunition shipped some days before, from Bridgeport.  A little further on, the line crossed the Satilla River.  There lay the Dauntless, purchased by Rubens.  Steam was up, and a quick job was made of transferring cargo and men from train to boat.  Another tug brought a supply of coal, and soon after sunrise another expedition was on its way to Cuba.  All this may be very immoral, but some who were on the expedition have told me that it was at least tremendously exciting.