He wasn’t very happy at home. Pitch lived next door to us for as long as I can remember, and he was pretty much a part of our family. We all knew he hated his job. He was a bookkeeper in the office of a big lumberyard, and the job kept him inside all the time. He didn’t like that. I guess everyone had heard Pitch say at one time or another that he was going to quit and go to Antago to live with his stepbrother, Tom, who has a sugar plantation there. But no one believed him. Then a little over a year ago he did it. Quit just as he’d said he would, and went to Antago.”

“Good man,” the captain said, smiling.

“Yes,” Steve said seriously, “we were so glad he finally did what he’d always wanted to do. But we’ve all missed him very much.”

“He certainly didn’t talk like a bookkeeper,” the captain recollected. “You should have heard some of the tales he told me about the Conquistadores and the Spanish Conquest. They were enough to make your head spin.”

“Pitch was always interested in the Conquistadores. That was another reason he preferred to come down here rather than go anywhere else. He’s a lot closer to them here.”

“Then it’s Pitch you’re visiting on Antago,” the captain said.

Steve nodded. “He’s been asking Dad and me to get down to see him. Dad couldn’t make it very well with his work and all, but he wanted me to go. I had planned to visit Pitch early next summer, instead of coming down now when I only have a few weeks before school opens again, but …” Steve stopped, his gaze shifting uneasily between the captain and the shoreline of Azul Island. He hadn’t meant to divulge so much.

The captain was looking at him questioningly, waiting.

“I—I mean I just decided to come now,” Steve said, without meeting the captain’s eyes.

Smiling, the captain said, “But you’ll have seventeen or eighteen days on Antago before we pick you up on the return trip. Maybe you’ll find that long enough to be there.”

“Sure,” Steve said. “Maybe I will.”

A few minutes later the captain left, and Steve stood alone at the rail as the Horn rounded the island and made its way south toward Antago, twenty miles away. He stayed at the bow until he could no longer see the yellow, dome-shaped top of Azul Island, then went below.

In his cabin, he took a worn and much-handled newspaper clipping from the pocket of his suitcase. It was a picture taken on the plain of Azul Island, and Pitch had enclosed it in his last letter. It was because of this clipping, and only because of it, that he was visiting Pitch now instead of waiting until next summer. He couldn’t have stayed at home, wondering. He had to know.

Steve’s dark, somber eyes studied the canyon in the picture. He noted again the high walls, tapering down to the sea; the rolling, barren land in front; and the cliff at the end of the canyon, hanging two hundred feet or more above the floor. And then his intent gaze became fixed upon the group of horses running down the canyon before the many men who followed. The head of a man wearing glasses was encircled in pencil, and alongside was the notation “Me.”

A flicker of a smile passed over Steve’s face before he turned to the caption beneath the picture. He read it carefully, slowly, even though he could have recited it word for word:

CARIBBEAN ROUNDUP!—Last week a group of men from Antago traveled the twenty miles to Azul Island to spend the day wrangling the wild horses that inhabit that island. The horses are believed to be descended from those that the Spanish Conquistadores brought to this hemisphere centuries ago.