"The boys had got all this out of Queza about a month before I sold out
and joined them, and they'd rustled some money somewhere, and had
everything fixed up to go to Yucatan to bring home some of that gold
and diamonds. They wanted me to go along. I was in that frame of mind
in which I didn't care much about what happened to me, and they didn't
have to argue long. We dropped down the Rio Grande to a little place
on the Gulf coast near where Brownsville is now. We bought a little
boat from a fisherman--she wasn't more than thirty feet long and didn't
look like she could stand much weather; but Nebraska, who'd told us
that he'd done a little sailing on the California coast when he was a
lot younger than he was then, said she'd stand anything we was likely
to get in the Gulf. So we stocked her with provisions and water to
last a month or so, and Nebraska pointed her nose toward Yucatan.
"I didn't think then what a rank job it was that we were going to do,
but it won't do me any harm in your eyes to say that after we'd got
started and I began to realize what it all meant, I was ashamed. I
felt like a sneak and a coward all through the deal, but I couldn't
back out after I'd started, and so I went through with it.
"We run into a spell of bad weather and had to hug the coast mighty
close, and it was two weeks before we pulled into Campeche Bay, on the
northwest coast of Yucatan.
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