Orleans, and there took a tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the ship had run against that name in the dark!
“‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,’ says High Jack Snakefeeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.
“‘We will find ruins here or make ’em,’ says High. ‘The Government doesn’t care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation.’
“Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town. Them biblical towns we read about—Tired and Siphon—after they was destroyed, they must have looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca place. It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of ’em was light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server couldn’t have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers. We wondered what kept it from being
