“But the fog was up to our round-tops at sunrise this morning,” said Cary.

“I know it:  but we who were on the half-deck were not in it so long as those below, and that may have made the difference, let alone our having free air.  Beside, I suspect the heat in the evening draws the poison out more, and that when it gets cold toward morning, the venom of it goes off somehow.”

How it went off Amyas could not tell (right in his facts as he was), for nobody on earth knew I suppose, at that day; and it was not till nearly two centuries of fatal experience that the settlers in America discovered the simple laws of these epidemics which now every child knows, or ought to know.  But common sense was on his side; and Yeo rose and spoke—­

“As I have said before, many a time, the Lord has sent us a very young Daniel for judge.  I remember now to have heard the Spaniards say, how these calentures lay always in the low ground, and never came more than a few hundred feet above the sea.”

“Let us go up those few hundred feet, then.”

Every man looked at Amyas, and then at his neighbor.

“Gentlemen, ’Look the devil straight in the face, if you would hit him in the right place.’  We cannot get the ship to sea as she is; and if we could, we cannot go home empty-handed; and we surely cannot stay here to die of fever.—­We must leave the ship and go inland.”

“Inland?” answered every voice but Yeo’s.

“Up those hundred feet which Yeo talks of.  Up to the mountains; stockade a camp, and get our sick and provisions thither.”

“And what next?”

“And when we are recruited, march over the mountains, and surprise St. Jago de Leon.”

Cary swore a great oath.  “Amyas! you are a daring fellow!”

“Not a bit.  It’s the plain path of prudence.”

“So it is, sir,” said old Yeo, “and I follow you in it.”

“And so do I,” squeaked Jack Brimblecombe.

“Nay, then, Jack, thou shalt not outrun me.  So I say yes too,” quoth Cary.

“Mr. Drew?”

“At your service, sir, to live or die.  I know naught about stockading; but Sir Francis would have given the same counsel, I verily believe, if he had been in your place.”

“Then tell the men that we start in an hour’s time.  Win over the Pelicans, Yeo and Drew; and the rest must follow, like sheep over a hedge.”

The Pelicans, and the liberated galley-slaves, joined the project at once; but the rest gave Amyas a stormy hour.  The great question was, where were the hills?  In that dense mangrove thicket they could not see fifty yards before them.

“The hills are not three miles to the south-west of you at this moment,” said Amyas.  “I marked every shoulder of them as we ran in.”

“I suppose you meant to take us there?”

The question set a light to a train—­and angry suspicions were blazing up one after another, but Amyas silenced them with a countermine.