The cannon on the
platform were spiked and overturned. Drums beating, trumpets blowing,
torches aflare, the English freebooter marched straight to the market.
Up at the Treasure House, John Drake and Oxenham had burst open the
doors of the store-room just as the saddled mules came galloping to
carry the booty beyond danger. A lighted candle on the cellar stair
showed silver piled bar on bar to the value of one million pounds.
Down on the market, the English trumpeter lay dead. Drake had fallen
from a sword slash and, snatched up by comrades, the wound stanched by
a scarf, was carried back to the boat, where the raiders made good
their escape, richer by a million pounds with the loss of only one man.
{143} Drake cruised the Spanish Main for six more months. From the
Indians he learned that the mule trains with the yearly output of
Peruvian gold would leave the Pacific in midwinter to cross overland to
Nombre de Dios. No use trying to raid the fort again! Spain would not
be caught napping a second time. But Pedro, a Panama Indian, had
volunteered to guide a small band of lightly equipped English inland
behind Nombre de Dios, to the halfway house where the gold caravans
stopped.
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