The Buccaneer Farmer, page 99 by Harold Bindloss
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r lead and compass. Can't have you whistling for a pilot, and I'd sooner you put out your lights."
"It's your risk and not the first time I've broken rules. I guess I can keep her off the ground. We'll get busy presently and heave the hatches off. The B.F. cases are right on top."
Adam nodded, and beckoned Kit when the captain went away. "You haven't been in the Santa Marta lagoon yet. Stand by and watch the soundings and compass while Mayne takes her across the shoals. You may find it useful to know the channel."
Kit understood. Malaria and other fevers are common on low-lying belts of the Caribbean coast and skippers and mates fall sick. Moreover, the Rio Negro did not always load at the regular ports. Sometimes she crept into mangrove-fringed lagoons, and sometimes stopped at lonely beaches and sent loaded boats ashore when her captain saw the gleam of signal lights.
When it was getting dark, Kit and Adam went to the bridge and the former noted that his uncle breathed rather hard and seized the rails firmly as he climbed the ladder. The red glow of sunset had faded behind the high land and a gray haze spread across the swampy shore, but the water shone with pale reflections. On one side, a long, dingy smear floated across the sky. It did not move and Kit thought it had come from the funnel of a steamer whose engineer had afterwards cleaned his fires. Captain Mayne studied the fleecy trail with his glasses.
"I don't know if that's a coffee-boat going north; I can't make out her hull against the land," he said. "Sometimes there's a _guarda-costa_ hanging round the point."
"Better take no chances," Adam replied, glancing at the _Rio Negro's_ funnel, from which a faint plume of vapor floated.
Mayne signed to the quartermaster in the pilot house and the bows swung round. Half an hour afterwards, he rang his telegraph and the clang of engines died away while the throb of the propeller stopped. In what seemed an unnatural silence, a few barefooted deck-hands b