six in the afternoon
Followed by El Capitan , nosing and snuffing gratefully at the cool waters , he waded the ford , and with his camera case swinging from his shoulder , galloped up the opposite bank and back into the trail . A minute later , the bridge , unable to recover from the death blow struck by El Capitan , went whirling into the ravine and was broken upon the rocks below . Hearing the crash behind him , Chesterton guessed that in the jungle a tree had fallen . They had started at six in the afternoon and had covered twenty of the forty miles that lay between Adhuntas and Mayaguez , when , just at the outskirts of the tiny village of Caguan , El Capitan stumbled , and when he arose painfully , he again fell forward . Caguan was a little church , a little vine-covered inn , a dozen one-story adobe houses shining in the moonlight like whitewashed sepulchres . They faced a grass-grown plaza , in the centre of which stood a great wooden cross . At one corner of the village was a corral , and in it many ponies .