Читать книгу Sard Harker - John 1878-1967 Masefield - Страница 3

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Santa Barbara lies far to leeward, with a coast facing to the north and east. It is the richest of the sugar countries. Plantations cover all the lowland along its seven hundred miles of seaboard, then above the lowland is foothill, covered with forest, rising to the Sierras of the Three Kings, which make the country’s frontier.

The city of Santa Barbara lies at the angle of the coast in the bight of a bay. The Old Town covers the southern, the New Town the northern horn of the bay: in between are the docks and quays.

In the northern or New Town there is a plaza or square, called Of the Martyrdoms. Until about thirty years ago, there was a block of dwelling-houses on the western side of this square, which attracted the notice of visitors. Though the other buildings in the square were gay or smart, with flowers, colours and lights, these were always dingy, by decree. If any asked why they were dingy, they were told that those were the houses of the last sighs, “las casas de los sospiros ultimos,” and that they dated from the time of the Troubles under Don Lopez, who was Dictator de Santa Barbara from 1875 till 1887.

This Don Lopez de Meruel, called The Terrible, after nine years of murder and cruelty, began a year of madness by decreeing that he should be given divine honours in all the churches of the State. Finding himself opposed by some of the clergy and by many of the hidalgos, he seized the daughter of one of his richest landowners, Señorita Carlotta de Leyva de San Jacinto, then on a visit to the capital, and ordered her to pray to him while he sat throned in public on the high altar of the mission church. On her refusal, he ordered her to be enclosed in a house of common prostitutes.

The mistress of this house, an Englishwoman known as Aunt Jennings, refused to obey the order to receive her. “Miss Carlotta is a lady,” she said, “and she does not come in here. And none but a dirty dog would have thought of sending her. And as for praying to the dirty dog, Miss Carlotta has done quite right. If he wants folk to pray to him, let him come here, and my little Sunday school will give him all the pray he wants with a wet rag off the dresser.”

When this was reported to Don Lopez, he ordered that Carlotta and Aunt Jennings should be taken along the water-front by the hangman as far as the Plaza in the New Town, and that there their throats should be publicly cut against the walls of the houses on the west side, then used as houses of charity. This deed was at once done. The two women were killed by Don Lopez’ son, Don José, then a lad of twenty, assisted by a negro (Jorge) and two half-breeds (Zarzas and Don Livio).

Don Manuel San Substantio Encinitas, the betrothed lover of Carlotta, was then at his estate of Las Mancinillas, two hundred miles away. When the news of the crime was brought to him, he gathered his friends, sympathisers, and estate servants, some seven hundred in all, and marched to unseat Don Lopez and avenge the murder.

His army was routed by Don Lopez in a green savannah near the city; many of his friends, not killed in the fighting, were hunted down and killed; he himself, with about forty horsemen, rode from the battlefield, then swerved and made a dash for the city. They appeared at the Old Town at sunset and summoned the fortress to surrender.

Don Livio, who commanded in the fortress, recognised Don Manuel and determined to outwit him. While parleying at the gate as though for terms, he sent a lad, one Pablo de Chaco-Chaco, to some Republican troops quartered outside the fortress in a sugar warehouse. These troops, being warned by Pablo, took up their positions in windows commanding Don Manuel’s troop and suddenly fired in among them. In the skirmish which followed, Don Manuel’s men fell back along the water-front, and were shot down as they went. As darkness closed in, the last six of them, including Don Manuel, gathered at what is known in the ballads as the Bajel Verde, a green boat or lighter drawn up on the beach. Here they made a stand till their ammunition failed. They then took to the water, swimming, in the hope of reaching some English ship in the harbour. But by this time Don Livio had sent out soldiers in boats to patrol the water-front. All of the six except Don Manuel, were shot or clubbed, as they swam, by these patrols. Don Manuel, through fortune, and because he took to the water some minutes after the others, managed to reach the English barque Venturer, whose captain (Cary) took him aboard, and brought him a few days later to safety in Port Matoche.

Eighteen months later, having laid his plans with care, Don Manuel sailed from Calinche with another company, in a tramp steamer. He landed unexpectedly at Santa Barbara, shot Don Lopez with his own hand and made himself Dictator.

In spite of frequent risings of the Lopez faction, most of them led or inspired by Don José, who had escaped Don Manuel’s justice, the rule of the New Dictator was the most fruitful of modern times.

Lopez had caused a rhyme to be carven over the door of the cathedral of Santa Barbara. In translation it runs:

Lopez found me brick

And left me stone.

When the new cathedral was built upon the site of the old, men remembered this rhyme, and pled that it should be recarven:

Lopez found me brick and left me stone,

Manuel made me like an angel’s throne.

For indeed Don Manuel, in his rebuilding of the city, made the cathedral the marvel of the New World. That and the chapel of Carlotta at his palace, were the chief of his works in his own mind; but in truth he made Santa Barbara as eminent for the arts and sciences as for religion. He founded, built and endowed four big universities, three opera-houses, nineteen theatres. He discovered, encouraged, helped, and at last employed through the years of their power, all the architects, sculptors, painters, musicians and poets who have made Santa Barbara the glory of Spanish-speaking America.

In his person Don Manuel was as glorious as his mind. He has been described in a sonnet:

A calm like Jove’s beneath a fiery air.

His hands most beautiful and full of force,

Able to kill the wolf and tame the horse

Or carve the granite into angels’ hair.

His brow most noble over eyes that burn

At thought of truth or knowledge wanting aid.

His mind a very sword to make afraid,

A very fire to beacon at the turn.

His step swift as a panther’s, his will fierce

To be about the beauty of some deed,

Since beauty’s being is his spirit’s food.

His voice caressing where it does not pierce;

His wrath like lightning: he is King: indeed

He is much more, a King with gratitude.

*****

Chisholm Harker, rector of Windlesham, in Berkshire, wrote a pamphlet on English Mediæval Mystical Romances, and died young, leaving a widow and one son, Chisholm, the “Sard” Harker of these pages, who was thirteen at his father’s death.

Mrs. Harker married again two years later. Sard, at his own request, went to sea, sailing first in the barque Venturer, Captain Cary, mentioned a page or two back. He was on his first voyage in her when Don Manuel took refuge in her. She was one of Messrs. Wrattson & Willis’s sugar-clippers, then regularly trading to the ports of Santa Barbara. Later in his time Sard followed Captain Cary into the Pathfinder and remained with him in her as third, second and at last as chief mate. He was mate of the Pathfinder and had been for ten years at sea when this tale begins. He was called “Sard” Harker (though seldom to his face) because he was judged to be sardonic. He, too, has been described in a sonnet:

A lean man, silent, behind triple bars

Of pride, fastidiousness and secret life.

His thought an austere commune with the stars,

His speech a probing with a surgeon’s knife.

His style a chastity whose acid burns

All slack false formlessness in man or thing;

His face a record of the truth man learns

Fighting bare-knuckled Nature in the ring.

His self (unseen until a danger breaks)

Serves as a man, but when the peril comes

And weak souls turn to water, his awakes

Like bright salvation among martyrdoms.

Then, with the danger mastered, once again

He goes behind his doors and draws the chain.

Captain Cary, who had made the Pathfinder a famous ship, thought him the best officer he had ever had.

The Pathfinder was the last and finest of Messrs. Wrattson & Willis’s sugar clippers. She made some famous passages in the sugar and wool trades before she went the way of her kind. She has been mentioned in several sonnets:

She lies at grace, at anchor, head to tide,

The wind blows by in vain: she lets it be.

Gurgles of water run along her side,

She does not heed them: they are not the sea.

She is at peace from all her wandering now,

Quiet is in the very bones of her;

The glad thrust of the leaning of her bow

Blows bubbles from the ebb but does not stir.

Rust stains her side, her sails are furled, the smoke

Streams from her galley funnel and is gone;

A gull is settled on her skysail truck.

Some dingy seamen, by her deckhouse, joke;

The river loiters by her with its muck,

And takes her image as a benison.

*****

How shall a man describe this resting ship,

Her heavenly power of lying down at grace,

This quiet bird by whom the bubbles slip,

This iron home where prisoned seamen pace?

Three slenderest pinnacles, three sloping spires,

Climbing the sky, supported but by strings

Which whine in the sea wind from all their wires,

Yet stand the strain however hard it dings.

Then, underneath, the long lean fiery sweep

Of a proud hull exulting in her sheer,

That rushes like a diver to the leap,

And is all beauty without spot or peer.

Built on the Clyde, by men, of strips of steel

That once was ore trod by the asses’ heel.

A Clyde-built ship of fifteen hundred tons,

Black-sided, with a tier of painted ports,

Red lead just showing where the water runs.

Her bow a leaping grace where beauty sports.

Keen as a hawk above the water line

Though full below it: an elliptic stern:

Her attitude a racer’s, stripped and fine,

Tense to be rushing under spires that yearn.

She crosses a main skysail: her jibboom

Is one steel spike: her mainsail has a spread

Of eighty-seven feet, earring to earring.

Her wind is a fresh gale, her joy careering

Some two points free before it, nought ahead

But sea, and the gale roaring, and blown spume.

*****

Las Palomas, where this story begins, is far away to windward on the sea-coast of the Tierra Firme. It has grown to be an important city since the northern railway was completed. It has been a frequented port since the days of the Conquistadores, because it is a safe harbour in all winds save the north, with good holding ground and an abundance of pure water for the filling. In the years 1879-80 it had an evil name, for it was then the nearest seaport to the newly discovered goldfields at Entre las Montanas in the province of Palo Seco, three hundred miles inland. Many diggers returning with gold from the fields were knocked on the head at Las Palomas.

Las Palomas means the Doves. It got its name from the blue rock-pigeons which used to haunt the cliffs just south of the old (or Spanish) town. The cliffs are now covered with buildings and the pigeons are gone. The only doves thereabouts now are the Little Doves of Santa Clara in a Convent school so named.

Las Palomas was formerly mainly a coffee and sugar port, but of late years it has become a great place for the exportation of copper-ore from the mines at Tloatlucan, only seven miles inland.

Nearly thirty years ago, when this story begins, there was open savannah to the north and north-west of Las Palomas city. In those days you could walk (in that direction) in less than an hour from the heart of the city into primeval forest. If you walked due north along the beach, from Jib and Foresail Quay on the water-front, you could reach a part of the forest in two miles. This was a clump of pines which came right down to the sea on a tongue of red earth.

If, in those days, you walked through those pines, still northward over the tongue, you came to a little beach, edged with a low bank of shrubbery. There, between the forest and the sea, was the mansion known as Los Xicales, where old General Martinez, the last descendant of one who came there with Cortés, lived to his end in faith, poverty and style.

Los Xicales.—Nobody knew at a first hearing what the xicales were. They were not jicales nor jicaras, as many thought, but trumpet-shaped flowers, with blue and white stripes, which General Martinez had brought there from the Indian territory. They were neither convolvuluses, petunias, nor hermositas, though like all three. They were just “xicales,” which is as near as the Spaniards could come to the Indian name for them, which means, simply, “flowers.” The house might have been called “the flowers” without loss of time.

*****

On the evening of the 18th March, 1887, just ten years before my story begins, Sard Harker, then on his first voyage to sea, lay in the barque Venturer, in Las Palomas harbour, expecting to sail at daybreak for Santa Barbara, “to complete with sugar for home.”

During the day, while bending sails aloft, he had seen the white walls of Los Xicales and had been struck by their likeness to a house in England, near the sea, where he had stayed as a child. He had taken a good look at the place, while waiting for the sail to come up to him, with the thought that it was either a coastguard station or a lighthouse. After that, work occupied him until dusk, so that he put the house out of his mind.

For some weeks he had been training himself to be “a hard case,” that is, able to stand exposure, by sleeping on the top of the deckhouse, between the mizen staysail and one of the boats. Here, with one blanket between himself and the deck, one blanket over him, and a coil of boat’s falls for a pillow, he went to bed that night as usual, thinking the thoughts which meant much to him. These thoughts were not about the house, but about a girl, whose idea filled his inner life intensely.

He had thought his thoughts of this girl, as he always did, when putting the day from him, and had then turned over, to sleep as usual. He saw the stars overhead, through a maze of the main-rigging: he heard the water go crooning and gurgling by, and a man in the deckhouse beneath him knock out his pipe; then instantly he was asleep, in a sea-sleep, a depth of sleep, a million miles from this world.

Out of his sleep he started up, an hour before dawn, with that mansion by the sea lit up in his brain and words ringing like prophecy in his ears:

“You will meet her again in that house, for the second of the three times. It will be very, very important, so be ready.”

He had risen up in the cold and dew of before dawn to stare towards the house, almost expecting to see it lit with angels; but it lay among its trees, barely visible. The dew was dripping, the water crooning and the watchman humming a song between his teeth. The cook was up making coffee, for there was a light in the galley; everything was as usual, except himself.

He was so shaken with excitement that he gripped the mizen stay to keep himself from leaping overboard to swim to that lone beach. Then caution had come back upon him, with the thought, “It will not be to-day; we are sailing to-day; ‘it will be,’ the message said, not ‘it is’; I am to stand by; it is all for the future, not for now.”

At that moment the order came to call all hands; and by daylight the Venturer was standing out from the northern channel, while Sard cast loose the gaskets and shouted “All gone the main-royal” to those on deck. For more than nine years he saw no more of Las Palomas, but the memory of his dream remained intense. The “first” of the “three times” was the deepest thing in his life: it made him shake, even to think of it: the hope of the second time kept him alive.

Then in February, 1897, he came again to Las Palomas, this time as mate in the Pathfinder. Again he looked out on Los Xicales, this time through a strong telescope from the main top-gallant cross-trees. He saw the house unchanged in all those years, save that it looked more battered. When he could he went ashore, and walked northward along the beach, over the tongue of red earth with the pine trees, to the house itself.

He found no barrier to his entrance to the grounds on that side, save the close-growing thorny mita shrubs which covered the low bank above the beach. Beyond the bank, they had spread beach-shingle as a drive; the house rose up out of the shingle white and withered against the blackness of pines and the gloom of Spanish moss. It was a pleasant, Southern mansion, less than twenty years old, the worse for wear. It had a look of having come down in the world, or rather, that staring look of having come past its best, which houses share with men and flowers:

“This neither is its courage nor its choice

But its necessity, in being old.”

It had a look of having no heir, and of being the last of the family. It had not been painted since its builders left it nineteen years before.

It was shuttered up tight, throughout; no smoke rose from it; plainly everybody was away. He noticed big leaden urns near the blistered green verandah. They were filled with a sprawling trailer about to blossom. He thought, “These are probably rare flowers, brought here when the house was new, when the owner thought that he would be a success.”

He stared at the house, thinking that there he was at last, after all those years, there at the house of his dream, where he was to meet her for the second time.

And now, on the excitement of being there, after all those years, after his mind had gone alone so often to where he stood, came the disappointment, of finding the house shut up, with no one there. He had half-expected and wholly hoped to have found her outside the house, looking for his coming. Hope and expectation were dashed. The house was empty.

Feeling that he was trespassing, he walked to the western side of the house, climbed the stone steps and rang the bell, which gave forth a jangle far away to his left. No one answered the bell, though he rang a second time. Little scraps of plaster were scaling off the wall by the bell-pull; the forest behind the house needed cutting back: it was coming too close with its evil and its darkness. The noise of its sighing was like the whispering of heirs about a death-bed.

“I am not to meet her here this time,” he said to himself; “but since she may live here or have been here, I will go all round it, so that I may know what she has known.”

He found that it ran, roughly, north and south, parallel with the beach. It had an old green verandah on the sides looking on the sea; the stone perron and steps on the west, and out-houses, on which the jungle was encroaching, to the north. On the north side was a path, which seemed to be still in use: it led through an iron gate, which was open, as though to invite him on. He passed through it, into a jungle of evergreens, in which he heard the noise of water. In a few minutes he came out on to a causeway of stone which led over swampy ground to a pier or quay, on the bank of a river which curved out into the sea there. The pavement continued inland upstream along the bank of the river till the forest hid it from sight.

As all water interests a sailor, Sard stopped on the bank to watch this river. It came round a curve out of the forest, broadened suddenly to a width of thirty yards, and went babbling in a shallow over the sands into the sea. It was like listening to poetry to hear it.

“They had this place a harbour once,” Sard thought, “and boats loaded produce here. Then, in some flood, the other side of the harbour was washed away: there is a bit of a pier of masonry still standing: and they were never able to afford to repair it. This river makes the northern boundary of the estate, I suppose.”

He stayed, watching the water so intently that he never saw the approach of a woman, coming from the forest along the path by the riverside. He looked up suddenly and found a tall old proud-looking negress within a few feet of him. She was dressed in black, she wore a mantilla over her shoulders, and a big straw Gainsborough hat upon her head. She wore very heavy old silver earrings in her ears, which were small. Her nose was small; her face was sharply and cleanly cut; she walked like an empress; she had race in every line of her. She carried a small basket, which Sard judged to contain eggs or meat. She seemed at once both to resent and to ignore Sard’s presence there. Sard saluted her, and asked her whether he could reach a road to Las Palomas by continuing along the river.

“Yes,” she said. “But if you will come with me by the house, it will be a shorter way.”

She led Sard back along his path; presently they were in sight of the house.

“Madam,” Sard said, “who lives in this house?”

“It is closed at present. I live here with my husband. I am Tia Eusebia, the caretaker.”

“Whose house is it?”

“It is the house of General Martinez, who is away in the South.”

“It has been a beautiful house. Is General Martinez married? Has he children?”

“God has willed that the General should be alone.”

“When will he return?”

“Who knows?”

By this time they were at the northern end of the house where there was a small door. Tia Eusebia brought out her door-key.

“See,” she said, “since you want the road to Las Palomas, continue past the house; turn to the right near the front door, up the drive to the lodge. The gates are locked, but you can pass. If you then turn to the left, you will be upon the road to the North Gate of Las Palomas, which is distant, by the savannah, a league; but, by the seashore, less.”

“Thank you indeed, Madam, for your guidance,” Sard said. “And now will you tell me yet one thing more? Do you know of one, Señorita de la Torre, who has been to this house, or is now here or to come here?”

“De la Torre?”

“Yes. Señorita Juanita de la Torre.”

“God has neither brought nor promised such,” she said. “It is thought that some English may come here, but of no such name.”

“This lady is not English, but Spanish.”

“If she be young and beautiful, she will not come here, Señor, where youth died long ago and beauty withered. This is the house of the xicale flowers, brought from the Indian country by the General, for his love, who died before she saw them, and for his son, who died before they flowered.”

“They flower for others, Señora,” Sard said.

“Others do not taste with my tongue,” she said. “But since God favours others, it is enough. Vaya con Dios, Señor.”

“Adios, Señora.”

He went, as she had told him, up the drive to the lodge, which was ruinous but inhabited, since a negro child was crying in it. The gates were locked, as she had said, but he could pass by a gap in the fence into the road. The fence was mainly gap: it might have been said that the gaps had fence in them. The forest shut in the road, which went on the right hand (as he judged) to a bridge over the river, and on the left hand to the savannah and Las Palomas. Sard walked back to Las Palomas and went on board his ship to his cabin.

Sitting there, on his red velvet settle, he wondered what it all meant. On an unforgettable day fourteen years before, when he was a boy, he had met a girl, who had changed his life for him. He had met her by a succession of chances and had never seen her since. Four years later, he had been told in a dream, such as no one could neglect, that he would meet the girl again at Los Xicales.

After the dream, life had kept him away from following his fancy: he had had to serve his time and make his way. Five years after the dream, he had been free for a while: he had gone to Spain to look for the girl, but had found no trace of her.

“And now that I come to Los Xicales,” he said, “I find the house shut up and her name not known. Whenever I hope to make this more than a dream, it goes to nothing.”

He looked from his ports upon the deck of the ship. He told himself that he was a grown man who ought not to let himself be swayed by a dream. “As for the girl,” he told himself, “she is dead or has forgotten, or is where I shall never see her.”

“I will put her right out of my mind,” he said. He tried to interest himself in a book, but found it impossible. “I cannot put her out of my mind,” he said. “She is all twined into it and part of it. And the dream tells truth. Probably she is at Los Xicales now and needs my help.”

As this thought was unbearable, he went ashore again to make sure. “She will be there this time,” he told himself. “Beyond all doubt she will be there this time.” Presently he was at the lodge gates, making sure.

At the lodge, a negro child was still crying. A very tall, lean, pale negro was sitting on the edge of the lodge’s verandah-stoop, plaiting a withy-basket. Sard hailed him.

“Has a Spanish lady come to this house to-day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is she at the house now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is her name, do you know?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is her name?”

“What is her name?”

“Yes,” Sard said, “what is her name?”

“What name?”

“The name she is called by: her surname.”

“Whose name?”

“The lady’s name.”

“Which name? There’s so many names.”

“The name of the Spanish lady who came to this house to-day.”

“Oh,” the man said, “the name of the lady who came to this house to-day?”

“Yes, that is what I want to know; what is her name?”

“Yes, sir,” the negro said; “now I know what you want. I didn’t know for the first moment what you asked me about, but now I know. Oh, yes, sir. Look, sir, I’m making a basket:

Put the withy there,

Cross the withy there,

Jesus in the air ...

Sir, forgive my asking, but have you a little bit of tobacco or a god-dam cigarette?”

“No,” Sard said, “I have not.”

“What do you want here, sir?” the man asked. “What do you come to this house for? This is General Martinez’ house.”

“So I understand,” Sard said. “I want to know the name of the lady who came to this house to-day.”

“Oh, Lord, are you American?”

“No.”

“I thought you were an American, because you talked such funny language.”

“What is the name of the lady?”

“There is no lady here, sir; the lady died a hundred years ago. Oh, say, the lovely yellow candles, and the priest he go Do diddy diddy oh do.”

“Then there is no lady?”

“All put into the grave: ring a bell: Do.”

“Is anyone at the house at all?”

“All in the grave. Do. Ring the bell. Do.”

A square-faced man, riding sideways on a heavily-laden mule, stopped in the road.

“Sir,” he said to Sard, “can I be of service to you?”

“Yes, sir,” Sard said. “Can you tell me if any Spanish lady came, or is coming, to this house to-day?”

“The house is shut up, sir. No one will come to this house for some weeks. I, who am Paco, know this, since I have this day talked with Ramón, the caretaker of the General. It may be that in some weeks’ time, when the English, who are to be here, have come, Tio Ramón may know more.”

Sard thanked him and walked on; he came to a little bridge over the river, crossed it, and continued through the forest for half a mile, when he came to a cleared patch where a forge stood beside the road with an inn (of sorts) alongside it. Here a grey old Italian, who said that his name was Enobbio, confirmed what Paco had said: the house of Los Xicales was shut up, in the care of Tio Ramón and his wife Eusebia: no visitor would come there for some weeks.

Sard thanked him and returned to his ship.

“There it is,” he said, when he stood once more in his cabin. “This thing has no foundation in fact, but it has the power to make me do stupid things. I will not go ashore again, unless I have some certain tidings to take me there. This love has led me elsewhere in the past: it must not lead to folly now.”

His room was light enough to show how little his love had led him to folly in the past. He was a tall lean muscular man in hard condition, sunburnt to the colour of a Red Indian. His hair was black, very fine and worn a little long (to shore eyes). He was clean-shaven and his face was a clear brown with blood in it. Wind and sun puckers made his look hawklike. His hands were big and fine. He was always choicely and subtly well-dressed. Everything about him was fastidious, to the point of keeping people aloof and afraid.

His room contained many books, for he was deeply read in his profession and in the sciences allied to it. He spoke the four languages which he reckoned to be necessary in his profession. French, German and Norwegian he had learned from intelligent shipmates as a lad: Spanish he had learned more thoroughly, since it was “her” native tongue. He had read not widely but choicely in all these tongues. In English he cared deeply for only one literary period, from the coming of Dryden to the death of Doctor Johnson. A flute and the music of that time amused his odd moments. He had taught himself to make accurate drawings of things which interested him. His sketch books contained much that would be valuable now to historians of that old way of life:

“The forepeak of the Venturer at 3 a.m., March 3rd, 1889, after collision with the Tuggranong.”

“The main top-gallant parral goes.”

“The following sea. June 16th, 1891,” etc., etc.

On the bulkheads of his room were standard and aneroid barometers given to him by the Meteorological Society, with other instruments, for the excellence of his meteorological records.

He looked round these things, with the thought that they were not life, but the solace of loneliness. He felt as lonely as a captain. “I’ll go no more ashore,” he thought, “I’ll spend my time teaching the boys Spanish. Huskisson has a gift for languages: he ought not to be at sea.”

He did not go ashore again, but thought, day after day, that before he sailed he would perhaps go. As the time passed, the thought that he was a fool to be swayed thus by dreams kept him on board. In five more weeks the Pathfinder got her hatches on, although light, ready to drop down to leeward to Santa Barbara to complete with sugar for home. It was the evening of the 18th March, 1897: the tug was to be alongside early the next morning, to tow her clear of the Rip-Raps.

“It will be just ten years to a day,” Sard said, “at five to-morrow morning, since that dream was a fire in my soul; but all the same, I will not go ashore; this inner life of mine shall fool me no longer.”

He passed the evening making his room all ready for sea-fight, for the Pathfinder was a lively ship when not loaded down to her marks. When all was stowed and chocked, he took his flute and played some of the airs printed in D’Urfey’s “Pills to Purge Melancholy.” He was not more than a competent player, but the night and the water gave a magic to his fluting. The men came aft as far as the waist and hung in a body there,

“Listening to that sweet piping.”

At about ten o’clock, knowing that he was to be on deck at daybreak, he turned in. He heard Captain Cary, in the chart-house on deck, call the steward for his nightcap; he heard the steward go, and the spoon chink in the glass. Then the watchman went shuffling forward from the main hatch, tapping out his pipe. The sea gurgled down the side, then life was shut off as by the turning of a tap, he was asleep in a sea-sleep, dead to the world.

Out of his sleep he started up, an hour before dawn, with the knowledge that a gigantic cock of fire was bursting out of clouds and crowing:

“To-day, to-day, to-day, for the second of the three times, O be ready, O be ready, O be ready; at the house of the xicale flowers; to-day, to-day, to-day.”

Instantly the crowing of the cock and the image of the house were merged in the memory of the first time, so that all was burning with the idea of her. He leaped up, for all these things were real, in his room, there, as it seemed, to be touched and caught. He saw them slowly fade from him, die away, not as it seemed, into his brain, but out of his three forward ports into the greyness of morning. He followed them till his brow was pressed on the brass rim of one of the ports. There was nothing beyond but the deck, the hatch, the bulk of the mainmast made darker by the mizen staysail, and the noise of the dropping of dew.

“To-day,” he said, “to-day. Why, we sail to-day. We shall be gone in two hours, far out of this, and God knows if I shall ever be here again.

“Very well, then. I will go ashore. I will leave ship and sea, so as not to fail her.

“I cannot do that,” he added, “I am tied, both to Captain Cary and to the ship. I shall sail at daybreak. I must get on deck.”

It was but a step from his cabin door to the deck. He stood beneath the break of the poop, looking out upon the dimness; he heard the cocks crowing ashore.

“I’ll put these dreams in their place,” he said to himself. “But when they come, they are shaking experiences. As long as I know that they mean nothing, I can steer a compass course.”

He brought a towel to the waist, stripped and called the watchman to pour some buckets of salt water over him. As he dressed in his cabin afterwards, the steward brought him some coffee; he carried it out on deck, and heard the cocks crowing far inland in clearings of the forest. “It is a marvellous noise,” he muttered; “they shout for the sun before there is a glimmer, and the sun comes. To-day, to-day, to-day.”

The deck was wet with dew, which was dripping from the eaves of the deckhouses. The port was not yet awake, though lights were burning. The ship was awake: there was a light at the galley door; the boatswain was standing there, yarning with the cook; and from time to time a drowsy man shambled into the light from forward to fetch coffee or to ask a light.

Sard put his cup between two pins and stared at the line of the coast to the north of the town, some two or three miles from him. There, in the dimness of the dawn, the white of Los Xicales just showed against the blackness of the forest. He looked at it intently. It was one small patch of paleness, becoming clearer from minute to minute.

“That is it,” he said to himself. “I’ve thought of it every day for ten years, and stared at it ever since we moored, and been to it twice; and now that I am sailing I am warned again that I am to meet her there again. I am warned just as I was warned ten years ago, on this very day of the year, at this very time of the day, in this very berth of Las Palomas, just as I was sailing as I am to-day, for Santa Barbara, on that cruise when we saved Don Manuel. The second of the three times is to be to-day and I am to be ready.”

Looking over the water at the house, the emotion which had woken him surged back upon him, so that he had to grip the pins.

“It is all madness,” he said. “A man must go by intellect and will. These dreams fight against both. Life has settled the matter: I am not to meet her. My task here is to sail this ship wherever the old man bids me. Now I will do my task.”

He walked forward to the port half deck door where the boys stood waiting for a call.

“On deck; turn-to here. Get the colours up, ready for bending, two of you,” he said. “Huskisson, get the Blue Peter.” As they came trooping out behind him, he turned to the boatswain, who was hanging about in the waist waiting for the word.

“Rig the head-pump,” he said.

“Rig the head-pump, sir,” the boatswain said. “Head-pump there, two of you. Beg pardon, sir, shall we be heaving in, after washing down?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Dorney, the third mate, drove some of the boys forward with an accent from the northern midlands. “Now, choom Jellybags,” he said, “get tha boockets; and Nibs and Woolfram get tha scroobers. We want a good harbour scroob for sailing.”

Mr. Dorney was a rougher customer than the other mates, but a faultless practical seaman. He would have made a perfect boatswain. Anything to be done with hands (especially a dangerous thing) was Mr. Dorney’s delight. He had a heavy, loutish, expressionless face, which seemed to have been badly carved out of pale wood. He had only scraped through his navigation examinations after three attempts. “Ah haate all this fooss of sights,” he said. “Ah can foodge a day’s work.” In any emergency he was as swift as Sard himself, but his excellence stopped at seamanship: he was a coastwise seaman who had strayed into blue water.

In a minute or two Sard was forward with his watch, setting the pace in washing decks against the second mate. He had rolled up his trousers to the knee and worked barefooted in advance of the scrubbers, scattering sand for them to scrub with, then snatching buckets from the water-carriers to sluice the portion scrubbed. By the time his watch had worked aft to the main hatch, he was five yards ahead of the second mate. There came a hail from a water-boat going past them to the outer anchorage.

“Pathfinders ahoy!”

Sard went to the rail to take the hail. The water-boat was going dead slow, as though only half awake. She still carried her navigation lights, but men were taking them in and blowing them out as she paused to speak.

“Pathfinder ahoy!”

“Hullo, the water-boat.”

“Your tug won’t be alongside till six this evening.”

“At six this evening! Why not this morning?”

“She’s blown some of her god-dam guts out.”

“Where is she?”

“Having her guts done at Ytá-Ytá.”

“Right.”

“Will you tell Captain Cary?”

“Right, Mister.”

“The Otoque will be in. You’ll get your mail before you sail. So long, Mister.”

“So long, Mister.”

Sard slipped on shoes, unrolled his trousers and went to report to Captain Cary, who was sitting bolt upright in a chair in his chart-room, being shaved by his steward.

“The tug has broken down, sir. She can’t be alongside till six this evening.”

“Who said this?”

“The skipper of the water-boat, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harker. Mr. Harker.”

“Sir.”

“I shall wait for her. I won’t try the Rip-Raps without a tug. Carry on with your brass work and bright work. Stay one moment, I’ve got something to say to you, Mr. Harker. I believe you used to be fond of boxing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The agents gave me some tickets the other night, for a sort of an assault-at-arms this afternoon. Since we are not to sail, perhaps you would like to take them, and go, after dinner this afternoon. Would you like to go?”

“Thank you, sir. Yes; very much.”

“Then oblige me by taking the tickets. Steward, find the tickets for Mr. Harker.”

“Where are they, Captain Cary?”

“I told you to find them.”

“Very good, Captain Cary.”

They were in the pocket of the Captain’s go-ashore coat. They were handed over to Sard.

“You can take your own time, of course, Mr. Harker,” the captain said. “Let me see, you never got ashore here in the Venturer?”

“No, sir.”

“And I think you were only ashore once this time since the anchors were down. You ought to see the place; not that there’s anything to see: so stay out of the ship if you wish, till the tug’s alongside. I have always gone by the maxim, Mr. Harker, that one ought to see everything that one has the chance of seeing; because in life not many have one chance and none has two.”

“Thank you, Captain Cary. Are we to heave in, sir?”

“Not till this afternoon, Mr. Harker.”

“Thank you, Captain Cary.”

Sard returned to the deck to finish the washing down. He had the running rigging thrown from the pins and recoiled: he had the men to the brasswork; saw the colours up and the house flag and Blue Peter hoisted. Captain Cary was on deck by a quarter to eight with an eye like a hawk for a spot or a started rope yarn. Sard at that moment was at the windlass with the carpenter. Coming out, he cast a glance aft and a glance aloft, with the thought that for all that magnificent thing, the ship, he was the man responsible, and that she would stand even Captain Cary’s eye. “She is in good order,” he thought, “she can stand anything that the sea can send. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

She was indeed beautiful, even from forward, looking aft. The power of her sheer made a sailor catch his breath. She was not very lofty, but her yards were very square: her spread was huge. She was in lovely order; yards squared, harbour-stowed, all the chafing gear bran-new, and the decks already sea-shape. He sent a boy aloft to dip a rope clear, and then went aft, with an eye for everything and the knowledge that the ship was fit.

As he went aft, he stopped just abaft the fo’c’sle (the forward deckhouse) to have another look at her. He never realised how much he liked his work until just before it was tested. He looked up at her great steel masts with the enormous yards (the fore and main yards together, end for end, as long as three cricket pitches) with the thought that this was art, this iron shell, with her gear, and that he was the master of this art. “It’s a good framework,” he thought, “a good foundation. Building a steeple is only going a little further in the same direction, and building a steeple is the finest thing a man can do. But a steeple is based on rock and this thing flies along water. This thing works for her living.”

He stopped abreast of the main-rigging to have a word with “Pompey” Hopkins, the second mate, a fair-haired, snub-nosed man of twenty-three, whose sea career he had watched from its beginning. He was called “Pompey” because he came from Portsmouth.

“Any chance of a Liverpool leave, Mr. Harker, since we are not to sail?”

“None, Mister,” Sard said; “you know the old man by this time, don’t you?”

“What shall we be doing, then?”

“After breakfast he will have a look-see and decide to trim her by the head.”

“I used to think sugar was a food,” Pompey said, “but now I know that it’s a poison.”

Sard left the deck in charge of Pompey and went below to make ready for breakfast. He had been too busy ever since dawn to think of his own affairs, but down in his cabin the words of the warnings rang again in his brain: “You will meet her again in that house: it will be ... very, very important.” And deep within his mind a voice seemed speaking: “You, who did not believe, see what has been done for you. The way has been cleared for you to go ashore.”

“Yes,” he thought, “I shall be ashore by two bells. I could go to the house before the boxing. I shall be free here for five hours, when I expected to be out at sea. All the same, I am not ashore yet. Captain Cary may change his mind.”

For the last two years he had noticed old age, “with crawling clutch,” laying hold of Captain Cary. One of its results was an old-maidish inquisitiveness about his officers’ doings ashore; a desire to screen them from “temptation.” This was easily to be understood, since he had himself trained all his officers from their first coming to sea, but it was trying to grown men. Sard knew that Captain Cary looked upon him partly as a favourite chick, a prize hatching from a clutch who had become “my mate,” or “my chief officer,” or “my Mr. Harker,” but that mainly Captain Cary still thought of him as a boy in the half deck, whose morals must be watched in port. “I know,” he muttered, “the old man will say something at breakfast that will check my movements ashore. He won’t give me absolute liberty on the day of sailing.”

He went into the long narrow cabin, that was painted white fore and aft; little shields painted with blue and white stripes were on all the doors opening into this cabin. A clock and a tell-tale compass were under the skylight, set into the coamings. All round the after bulkhead were stands of arms, old Snider rifles, bayonets, boarding pikes, tomahawks and cutlasses, all shining like stars. On the table were six red geraniums in pots. The table shone with electro-plated ware, for Captain Cary kept a style. He was at the head of the table in clean white drills. The old steward stood at attention beside him. Sard took his seat.

At breakfast, Captain Cary, after feeding his canaries, talked of the pleasure of getting away to sea with a full crew. “When my brother was here in the Lolita in ’79, in the beginning of the gold-rush, everybody left her, except his boatswain, and none of them came back, except one of the boys, a lad of the name of Jenkins, who had a lump of gold as big as one hand, done up in a handkerchief.”

“I hope, sir, that your brother charged Jenkins bullion-rates for freightage.”

“No, Mr. Harker; he gave him the end of a brace for going out of the ship. And Jenkins went ashore in the ship’s dinghy that night and never went aboard again. He started one of these low dance-and-cigar divans; there used to be too many of them. He married one of these greaser women after, but I never heard that he did much good.”

“Did your brother get a crew, sir?”

“Yes; when some of the gold-diggers had had enough of it; or too much, as often happened, for there were Indians, then, in the foothill country, seventy miles from here. When I was here myself, in ’74 or ’75, you could see the Indian bucks riding their ponies. You could get your hair cut for nothing outside the walls after nightfall in those days. You can get your throat cut for nothing inside the walls in these days, for the matter of that.”

“Yes, sir. I hear, sir, that that is because the rum-smugglers have been landing their cargoes along the coast here.”

“There’s a great deal too much lawlessness all along this coast, Mr. Harker, and it is all coming here from outside. Your Occidental is a quiet, hard-working man, or used to be, as I remember, but a breed of hard cases has got loose here out of some jail, or every jail in Europe by the look of them, and Las Palomas is not Occidental any longer. You couldn’t give the people liberty here, even on Sunday, not even just to go to the church ship and back. The place is a sink of iniquity. Mr. Hopkins, have you seen the Mission Church here? It is very remarkable; that is, it is said to be by those who know, for its paintings of the Last Judgment. I was thinking of sending you ashore this morning, to see them—since we are not to sail.”

“Thank you, sir; thank you very much, sir,” the second mate answered. The captain turned up his eyes as though he were watching a bird through the skylight: he reddened and gurgled in his throat.

Sard, who knew the symptoms, stole a glance at Pompey Hopkins, caught his eye and gave him the flutter of a smile. Pompey was another lad who had served all his seven years at sea under Captain Cary; he, too, was still a boy, in the captain’s eyes, to be guarded from the sins of a seaport town. Sard and he both saw the thought slowly crystallising in their captain’s mind:

“If I send this boy to one of these foreign churches, he may be caught by this foreign way of worship and fall into all kinds of sin: it is just devil-worship by what I understand of it. He had better stay on board and do some useful work.” In a few seconds the captain’s voice was heard again.

“I was thinking that, Mr. Hopkins; that I would send you ashore this morning; but I’m not at all satisfied with her trim. When we are riding light, as we shall be this time, I like her to be more by the head. I will just have a look-see, as the Chinese say, from the dinghy after breakfast, and if it’s as I think, Mr. Harker, you will have the people down and see if we can’t get her down more. She lies a much better course in a light wind when she is by the head.

“I think, too, Mr. Harker, that since we are so light, we’ll have the main-royal mast down on deck. And let the boys do it all, will you, with yourself and old Birkett. Since ships became big, they do not get the practice in these things which we used to have. I remember when people came down to the water-front to see a ship of seven hundred tons.”

“Yes, sir: do you indeed, sir?”

“Yes, sir, and ships of the line sent down top-gallant yards at dusk.”

Pompey Hopkins’ face expressed due wonder, with the inner reservation that “this kind of thing was the old man’s perk.”

“A little more kedgeree, Mr. Hopkins?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Steward, have the goodness to give Mr. Hopkins a little more kedgeree. About this kedgeree, Mr. Harker: they call the fish Pompano ashore here at Las Palomas, but it is not the true Pompano, which is the great delicacy at New Orleans, but more of a salt-water shad.”

“What’s in a name, Captain Cary? It is a credit to any name. What is the true Pompano like, sir?”

“Do you know, Mr. Harker, I never tasted it. I saw it in the boats at the levees, when I was there, but I was there in a fever season, and many people thought that the fever was spread by the fish; for it seemed to hang about the water-front. It is difficult to account for the fever in any other way. We lost seven men of the fever. They went ashore one night to bring down some scantlings we were in need of, and they all partook of this Pompano in one of these negro fish-joints, and they all afterwards sickened and died. I tell you these things, gentlemen, because you will one day command ship’s companies, and it is right that you should know to what you may expose them, when you send them on shore, even upon necessary duty.”

“Yes, sir, indeed,” Sard said, knowing that his turn was now come.

“Since the tug will not be alongside until six, Mr. Harker, I think that if you have no objection, I will accompany you ashore myself. I understand that this boxing contest is something more than one of these low-class fighting-den affairs; it is an affair of two athletes in a real gymnasium.”

“I shall be very proud, sir, if you will come with me,” Sard said. His heart had sunk at the thought, for it meant that he would have no chance whatever of going out to the house as he had hoped; but he was sincere when he said that he would be proud if the captain would come with him. Captain Cary was not only famous but most eminent in his profession. He was

“John Craig Cary of the ship Petrella,

Thunder-ship and Stand-from-under fella.

John Craig Cary when he makes a passage,

Treats his owners just as so much sassage,”

of the song of thirty years before.

“In the old Petrella, when I had her,” Captain Cary said, “we had two athletes forward. I felt that they took an undue position in the fo’c’sle. When we reached Sydney, I bought some sets of boxing-gloves and caused them to teach boxing to all hands for a plug of tobacco a hand. By the time we left China, there were six or seven men in each watch able to deal with them. I shall be glad to see some boxing again. I understand that you box, Mr. Harker? I think that I used to see you box when we went to Auckland that time.”

“Yes, sir, I used to box a little.”

“Steward, will you have the goodness to set out my shore-suit presently? I shall go ashore after coffee after dinner with Mr. Harker.”

“Very good, Captain Cary.”

“You will explain the different blows to me, Mr. Harker. I have never boxed, myself, but I have sometimes had to hit men. The principle I have always gone upon is, to be first.”

“It is a very sound principle, sir.”

After breakfast, Captain Cary had his look-see from the dinghy, and as a result of it Mr. Hopkins went below with the hands to trim her by the head. Sard, with the third mate and the best of the boys, got the main-royal mast down on deck. He himself went to the top-gallant cross-trees at the beginning of the work. Up there in the wind he had a good view of Los Xicales. There it was, white, shining and mysterious. “You are mixed up with my life,” Sard muttered, “and as far as I can foresee, I shall not find out why even this time.”

While he was aloft, he saw a big barquentine-rigged steam yacht come smartly in to the steamship anchorage and let go her anchor. She was of about six hundred tons, and this and the fact that she was flying the blue ensign, told him that she was the Yuba. He pointed her out to Borleigh, one of the boys there. “There is the Yuba, Sir James’s yacht, that went round the world, and then went back the other way to take the turn out.”

At dinner Captain Cary was uneasy about the weather.

“I think we’re in for a norther,” he said. “The air’s got that bright look and the glass is falling.”

“I was thinking that, sir,” Sard said. “It’s a bit plumy and whitish over El Cobre.”

“Eh? Whitish, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t like the idea of a norther in Las Palomas,” Captain Cary said. “I’d like to be out of it and clear of the Rip-Raps before it comes on.”

“We ought to be well clear of the Rip-Raps, sir, by eight bells.”

“I shall be glad of it, Mr. Harker,” Captain Cary said, “because I was here in the big norther of ’74—or was it ’75?—perhaps it was ’75. Seven ships went ashore: they drove, as we used to say, from Hell to Hackney. We did not go ashore, but we lost all three topmasts, and the sea made a clean breach on deck.

“In this shallow Golfe the sea gets up very quick, and is very short and very dangerous.

“However,” he added, “it seems to be coming on slowly. I dare say we shall be gone in plenty of time.”

After dinner, Captain Cary took Sard to the boxing-match. He took him in style, going first to the agents, then to the gymnasium, in a one-horse caleche hired on the water-front.

The gymnasium lay at a little distance from that part of Las Palomas to be seen from the ships. It was in the Ciudad Nueva, or New Town, on the slopes of savannah which led to the mountains, in a garden of palm, cactus and plumbago. In itself, it was remarkable, being an arena, a Circo Romano, as the Greek who kept it called it, built of limewashed adobe. When Sard had entered in with his captain, they both felt that they were in an arena of old Rome about to watch some gladiators.

There was, of course, no roof to it. It looked like a small circus ring surrounded by tiers of wooden seats. Inside the circus ring was a square platform on which a boxing-ring was pitched. The two sailors were shown to seats near the ring, but with one row of vacant seats between them and it. Their seats, being White Men’s Seats, were screened from the sun by an old green-and-white striped awning. From under this awning they could see the sky, intensely blue, the Coloured Men in the opposite seats, some palms rattling the metal of their leaves, and grasses, sprouted in the tiles on the adobe top, being hovered over by black and scarlet butterflies.

“Now, Mr. Harker,” Captain Cary said, “we seem to be in plenty of time. Since you know Spanish so well, here’s one of their programmes or bills of fare. You might read it over and let me know what it is that we are to expect.”

Sard took the sheet of coarse yellowish paper printed in blunt old type which had once printed praise of Maximilian. He read from it as follows:

“Feast of Pugilism.

At three o’clock punctually.

Grand display of the Antique Athletic.

Contests with the gloves for the decisions.

The Light-Weights, the Middle-Weights,

The World Famous Heavy-Weights.

At three o’clock, punctually.

At three o’clock, punctually.

Six contests of the three rounds for the Champions

Of Las Palomas

For the Belt of the Victor.

To be followed by a Contest Supreme.

Twenty Rounds.Twenty Rounds.

Twenty Three-Minute Rounds.

Between

El Chico, Champion Caribe de la Tierra Firme,

And

Ben Hordano, Champion, of Mexico City.

Grand Feast of Pugilism.

At three o’clock punctually.”

“H’m!” Captain Cary said, “it’s nearly three now. They evidently won’t begin very punctually, for we are almost the only white people here. We might have had time to go down the south end of the water-front to see that new floating dock they’ve got there.”

“Shall we go, then, sir?”

“No. It’s too late now. We’re here now. We may as well stay here now we are here. It’s a dock badly needed in Las Palomas and I wanted to see it. It’s like the one they have at San Agostino.”

They sat talking while they waited, but there was always a professional restraint about their talk. Captain Cary ashore was still “the old man,” Sard Harker, the mate, was still, in the captain’s eyes, the boy whom he had taught to steer. Both found themselves staring ahead over the further wall of the arena, at the old Spanish fortifications as white as spray beyond.

There came a pounce and squeal in the air just over the open ring. There were excited cries from the negroes, the wail died out and a few feathers drifted down into the ring.

“What is it?” Captain Cary asked.

“A hawk, sir; it came down and struck and carried away a little bird just over the ring.”

“That is what they call an omen of something.”

“An omen that the better fighter is going to win, sir.”

They were still almost the only whites in the arena. They chatted or were silent while the other side of the arena filled up with negroes and half-breeds who had come to cheer the Carib. Many of these, being young men, were dressed in what was then the extreme fashion among the coloured peoples. This fashion was based on the belief that youth is irresistible: it dressed men to look young. That there might be no doubt about it, the costumes chosen were those of little boys of six or seven years of age. About a hundred of the young bloods of Las Palomas were wearing little round straw sailor hats, with ribbons hanging from the bands over their faces. On their bodies they wore little sailor suits, with flopping collars and very short knickerbockers. Their legs were mostly bare from above the knee to the ankle. Little white socks and tennis shoes covered their feet. Had they carried little spades and buckets, they would have looked like little boys dressed for the seashore. As it was, they carried little parasols of red and blue stuff: many of them had opened these and sat beneath them in their places: the rest carried fans or handkerchiefs of bright colours. They were exceedingly noisy and merry: they seemed to make the arena-side to flash with their teeth. Until about twenty minutes past three, many of them shouted insults at the two whites, who sat unmoved, not knowing the debased dialect of the Occidental. After twenty minutes past three, many white men entered: the insults stopped, a drummer, a zither-player and a bone-rattler struck up a jig to which the negroes kept time with Hues and stamping.

“Very late in beginning,” Captain Cary complained. “It is half-past three now. If they mention a time, they ought to keep to it. They used not to be like this in the Occidental. They used to be people of their words, like the Chinese. But they have lost their religion since they began to make their fortunes, and now they are regular hasta mañana people.”

“They will not be long now, Captain Cary.”

“I ought to have known that they would be thoroughly late. We could have gone to the dock and then we could have gone to the cutting and seen the new steam-shovel that they talk about. That would have done us more good than sitting here all this time.”

“Things seem to be beginning to move now, sir.”

Indeed, things were beginning to move, for the bone-rattler had roused two negroes to leap into the ring to step-dance. This they did with extraordinary skill and invention against each other, among Hues and laughter. All the negroes present kept time with their feet to the slap and rattle of the dancers’ feet. The little boy bloods sang songs. Lemonade-sellers came round with drinks; cake-and-sweetmeat men, each in a cloud of flies, sold sticky messes for pennies. Then two men standing at the ringside with guitars, began to sing in falsetto about the cruelty of love; and a littleish skilly-faced man, whose head, having been clipped for ringworm, had a look of prison, offered to reveal the result of the big fight for a half peseta down. The Angel Gabriel had revealed the matter to him in a vision, so he said.

Captain Cary became silent as was his way when vexed. Sard was left with his own thoughts, which were of “her” and of his chances of getting to the house, as he meant, before he left the shore. His mind went over various schemes for getting rid of Captain Cary, but none seemed very hopeful. “He will have to come along,” he thought, “and at half-past four at the latest, I shall go from here.”

Then the hope of meeting her merged in his mind into an expectation of meeting her, in perhaps less than two hours. All his life, since he had met her as a boy, when sex was beginning to be powerful in him, had been a hope of meeting her again by some divine appointment. He was weary of waiting and waiting.

He was also weary of loneliness, for he was as lonely as a captain, although he had not yet come into command. He was the most hated, feared, and respected man he knew: men were afraid and boys terrified of him. He knew what was said of him: “He is not a companion ashore and sets too high a standard afloat.” “He’s a damned sardonic devil with a damned sardonic way.” “He may be a good sailor, but he’s an ass with it, staying on in sail, and he hasn’t a friend between Hull and Hades.”

He had, however, two friends, an Australian surgeon, whom he had met in Sydney, and a friar whom he had met in the Church of Saint John Lateran in Rome, during his one real holiday. That gaunt and burning soul, the friar, was the likest to himself in all the world.

Women he hardly spoke with from year’s end to year’s end. He had not been six months ashore in eleven years. His mother was alive, but they had not been good friends since her second marriage; he disliked his stepfather. The second marriage had been much of a shock to him in many ways. His only woman friend was an austere old lady with a gaunt and glittering mind, of whom he had been fond ever since his childhood. This was Agatha, Lady Crowmarsh, who lived in Berkshire. She was very proud of Sard and was ambitious for him in her own way and world, which were not his. They used to spar when they met, because he would not give up his power for her advantages. She wished him to be a part of her world of ruling families and permanent officials. He wanted to be himself, pitted against the forces which he understood, in a world of elements.

Sitting in the arena waiting for these boxers, he asked himself what his future held for him. How long was he going to be “an ass with it, staying on in sail?” He had indeed “passed in steam,” but there was something hateful to him in the thought of steam. It meant being subject to an engine-room: it came down to that: which seemed a fall after being a master of two elements on the deck of a clipper-ship. He knew very well that the sailing ship was doomed. He had watched the struggle for ten years, and had seen line after line give up the fight and “go into steam.” The tea-clippers had gone before he came to sea: the wool-clippers and big four-masters were being squeezed out: they were starved and pinched and sent to sea hungry, but even so they did not pay. “They can’t pay,” he said to himself, “they ought not to pay: they are anachronisms. The steamship is cheaper, bigger, safer, surer, pleasanter, and wiser. The sailing ship is doomed and has to go.”

He knew that his own owners, Wrattson and Willis, were feeling the pinch acutely, and that they were both too old to change the habits of a lifetime in time to avail. He had watched their struggle at close quarters, for their struggle was passed on to their ships without delay. They had been pinching their ships for some years; cutting down the crews to danger-point; cutting their officers’ wages; making old gear serve till it was junk, and grudging even a pint of oil for the decks. He had seen them become mean. When he first went to sea, the Pathfinder had carried four boys in the half deck: now she carried eleven. Each paid twenty or thirty pounds for their three or four years’ service; each did the work of an ordinary seaman, and the better trained of them worked with the sailmaker and made every sail they set. Yet all this would not serve. The steamship was beating them in spite of it all, and Wrattson and Willis were being squeezed out. There was no doubt of it; the fleet was going. The Venturer had been wrecked; the Voyager was being broken up; the Wayfarer had been sold to the Norwegians; the Loiterer had been sold to the Italians; the Intruder had been sold to the Portuguese; the Scatterer was up for sale; the Messenger and the Roysterer had been barque-rigged and sent to the West Coast; the Endeavourer and Discoverer were said to be going the same road; the Pathfinder, the glory of the fleet, would surely follow before long: the line would “go into steam,” or into liquidation.

Captain Cary spoke suddenly from the depths of his silence, as though he had followed the same lines of thought to another conclusion.

“Did you ever see the Petrella, Mr. Harker?”

“Yes, sir, I did; when she was lying for sale in the George’s Dock, in 1885. I went all over her and over her masthead.”

“Yes, yes. I think you have told me that. What did you think of her, Mr. Harker?”

“She was a very sweet little ship, sir.”

“We did not think her little, in the sixties, Mr. Harker. She was 891 tons. We carried a crew of 43 men and boys: sixteen hands to a watch: we could shorten her down to her lower topsails, which we were the first to set, or among the first, with the watch alone; or, if we had all the stunsails set, and it happened to be daylight, with the watch and the idlers. That is different from the Pathfinder, Mr. Harker.”

“Well, sir, we have a harder time to compete with.”

“A harder time,” Captain Cary said. “There is no such thing as an easy time; but in life you are wanted or not wanted; and the Pathfinder is not wanted.”

“Don’t say that, Captain Cary, a crack ship and captain will always be wanted.”

“Don’t you believe it, boy”; Captain Cary always called him a boy when he wished to silence all opposition. “Don’t you believe it. What is passing out of this world is the business of personal relations. Captain Wrattson is a master mariner, Mr. Willis is a ship-designer with a second mate’s ticket. When you go into their office you see that they know you and the worth of your efforts for them, and the difficulties you have faced for them. It is all friend to friend, man to man, sailor to sailor, if you understand what I mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So it was when I had the Petrella. Pennington and Foster were like that: Fremantle and Henry: Waltham and Binfields’, Shurlock Brothers, Richard Oakleys’, all the old firms were like that: the Green Sleeves Line: they were family affairs; an officer was a friend of the firm and could marry the employer’s daughter. But that is gone, or going: ships have become too big: they are not owned by “firms” now: nothing’s firm in the business: they are owned by companies; who don’t know one hand on their paysheets. A company, as we say, has neither a stern to be kicked nor a soul to be saved. It is a damned abstraction, Mr. Harker, without either a mind to understand or an eye to see: it has neither guts to scare nor hands to shake.”

“Yes, but, Captain Cary ...”

“Don’t answer me, boy: it is as I say.”

The bearings were plainly running hot, but luckily at this instant there came wild Hues as the whole negro audience rose to welcome the beginning of the boxing. The old negro boxers, who were seconding the early bouts, came to the ringside, pitched some much tattered gloves into the ring and hoisted two backless chairs into opposite corners. A couple of lanky lads, shivering in serapes, climbed through the ropes to the chairs, were gloved and introduced; then the gong struck and the bouts began.

The boxing, when it did begin, was fast and very skilful: it roused the partisans in the coloured men’s benches to fight with banana skins and half-sucked oranges. There were five, not six “contests of the three rounds,” and only one of the six went to the end of the third round.

“These lads are good at their business,” Captain Cary said.

“Yes, sir; there are two or three fine clever lads among those. That whitish-looking lad who beat the merry one, would be a dangerous boxer if he were fit.”

“Well, I enjoyed that. It was like an English summer; good when it came; but a long time on the road. Now I suppose we shall have to wait again, for the big fight.”

After the bouts of the boys, in the pause before the coming of the heavy-weights, the better seats, which had not been crowded, filled up with whites. Two men came down the gangway and sidled into the vacant ring seats just in front of the two sailors. One of them, who was powerfully built, Sard judged (from his back) to be a likely man, but when he saw his face he changed his mind: it was a rotten face: the muscle had all gone to brothel with the man’s soul.

His companion was a little, grey-bearded man, whose neck was swathed with a rag which partly hid a boil. The boil made him keep his head forward as he spoke. Both men spoke English as they entered. They looked hard at the two sailors for an instant before they sat down; then, having made up their minds that they were just a couple of English sailors, they sat and began to talk in Spanish, which Sard knew very well. The little man talked rapidly and much, using slang. Some of his front teeth were gone. He had a way of drawing his breath sharply through the gaps with a noise of relish. Sard reckoned that the bigger man was a flash townee, the other, probably, a fence. The little man was a spiteful little devil (perhaps the boil was touching him up) with a way of rising in his excitement to a kind of song. Sard thought him a horrid little man, but likely to be clever in his own rather dirty little way.

“Yes, these negroes,” the little man said, in Spanish, “they need to be fed into the hopper and be taught the way again. They are getting too uppish to my liking. I love my black brother, but I love him best with the toe of a boot, to show him he’s got to go. Yes, sir, he’s got to go. This is God’s country: it ain’t going to be any black man’s not while little ’Arry Wiskey is on the tapis.

O yes, it is God’s country,

For no black man’s effrontery.

How long are these Dagoes going to keep us waiting? We’re twenty minutes late as it is. Hasta mañana; that’s always the way with these Dagoes. They got no sense of the value of time, even the good ones. That’s singing to their guitars instead of sound commercial competition. We shall be late, setting out.”

“Here’s El Chico, anyway,” the other said. “And even if it goes the twenty rounds, we shall have time enough for Mr. Bloody Kingsborough.”

The little man seemed scared at the mention of the name, and glanced back, over his shoulder, to see whether either Sard or Captain Cary had noticed.

“Hush, Sumecta,” he said. “No names.”

“He doesn’t understand Spanish,” Sumecta replied, meaning Sard. “And if he does, what odds?” He glanced back at Sard, whose face seemed intent upon the Carib, then just entering the ring. Sumecta’s eyes followed Sard’s to the Carib: he spat, turned to Mr. Wiskey and said, in a low voice:

“He won’t have much show.”

“Who, El Chico or Mr. K.?”

“I meant El Chico; but Mr. K. won’t have much.”

“Have much!” Mr. Wiskey answered; “he’ll have about as much show as a cat in hell without claws. When it’s peace, he has a show, but when it’s war, he’s got to go.”

The Carib pitched off his green wrapping, sat down upon his chair and stretched out his legs for his seconds to massage them. His reddish-brown skin moved with the play of healthy muscle: he shone with health and oil.

“Yes,” Mr. Wiskey muttered, staring at the Carib, “you may listen and you may glisten, but you’ll go where the nightshade twineth if you put the cross on little ’Arry Wiskey.”

“So this is Chico,” the Captain said. “Well, Mr. Harker, he looks to me liker a panther than a human being. I must say that I do not like to see these cannibals pitted against Christians. I am in two minds about staying.”

“Sir, I expect he is as good a Christian as the other. And he may not be nearly so good a fighter.”

“True,” the Captain said. “The Church has lost its hold here, as I was saying, but still I don’t think that even these modern Occidentales would let a Carib fight a Christian, if they thought that he stood a chance of winning. Where is this other, the Christian? I think, Mr. Harker, I will go get a cigar at the office, while this other man is being made ready, if you will keep my seat.”

“I will keep your seat, Captain Cary.”

After Captain Cary had edged away to buy a cigar, Sard waited for the two men in front to go on with their talk, for what they had said had interested him. He had not liked to be ranked with any other mate who knew no Spanish, and he wondered why Mr. Bloody Kingsborough was to have no show. Who was Mr. Bloody Kingsborough? He did not know the name. The tone in which the name was pronounced suggested that Mr. Kingsborough was judged to give himself airs. Sard judged that if Mr. Kingsborough did not take good heed, he would be a bloodier Mr. Kingsborough before dawn. Chico was not to have much show in any case, but to have none if he disappointed Mr. Wiskey. Sard hoped that the talk would go on, but it did not. Mr. Wiskey began to eat a pomegranate by tearing off the skin with his teeth and spitting it out into the ring.

“He’s a dirty shining yellow snake,” he said at last in English, meaning Chico; “Palm-oil all over him. It’s that that gives them leprosy in their old age. Yah, you dirty Carib,

Knocky, knocky neethy

On your big front teethy.

That’s what’s coming to you in one dollar’s worth. The royal order of the K.O., or else a boot you’ll feel for as long as you can sit. Yet he looks a treat. If he could have the yellow bleached out of him, he’d make a bit for a manager, sparring exhibition bouts up West.”

“He would that,” Sumecta said, also in English.

“He’s got the torso of a Greek god, as they say, though which his torso is I never rightly understood.”

“It’s like you would say his physique.”

“The slimy yellow ounce-cat.”

“Heya, Chico,” Sumecta called, “Chico!”

The Carib caught Sumecta’s eye. Sard was watching him at the moment and saw a strange look of fear, or at least anxiety, pass over the savage face. Sumecta opened his mouth and tapped his teeth with his fingers: whatever the sign may have meant, it made Chico smile uneasily.

“Yes,” Sard said to himself, “these two ruffians have bought El Chico to lose the bout, and now that it comes to the point, El Chico is scared of these buck negroes with their razors. The whites will shoot him if he wins, and the coloured men will skin him if he doesn’t. And who is this Mr. Kingsborough who will not have much show, and for whom there will be time enough? I wish that they would say some more about Mr. Bloody Kingsborough.”

Mr. Wiskey suddenly turned round upon Sard. He had his head ducked down so as to avoid giving pain to his boil, and the ducked-down dart of the skull gave the movement something deadly, like the strike of a snake or ferret.

“He’s a treat, sir, for looks, and a beautiful boxer, this Chico, the Carib here,” he said to Sard. “Would you like to have a friendly dollar on him, just to give an interest to the proceedings?”

“Thank you. I do not bet,” Sard said.

Mr. Wiskey looked at him, but thought it better to be quiet.

“Quite right, sir,” he said. “I respect your feelings. I’m a gentleman myself and can appreciate them. They do you credit, sir.” He turned round to the ring again, took another wrench and spit from his pomegranate, bit into the seeds and said something in a low voice, with a full mouth in Spanish, to Sumecta, about “one of nature’s bloody caballeros.” There was a chill upon the talk for nearly a minute; then Sumecta turned round, had a look at Sard, and surveyed the benches behind him.

“There’s old Abner,” he said.

“Where?”

“In the back row, about seven from the end.”

Mr. Wiskey burst into song, parodying a familiar advertisement:

“He’s one of the party,

Old Abner MacCarty,

On the day of St. Patrick, at ten.”

“I don’t see Mr. Sagrado B.,” Sumecta said.

“He’s not staying for the party: he’s off: out of it: going by the briny.”

“The sort of thing he would do; mind his own skin.”

“Sound sense, too,” Mr. Wiskey said. “If a man won’t mind his own skin, there’s darned little he will mind, and no one else will mind it for him.”

Presently Sumecta turned again to Mr. Wiskey.

“What is Mr. Sagrado B.’s game with Mr. Kingsborough?” he asked in Spanish. “Besides the bit of skirt in the case, what is he out for?”

“You’ve seen the bit of skirt?” Mr. Wiskey asked.

“Yes. She’s it.”

“That’s what he is out for: just the woman in the case.”

“He’s getting to be too old for that kind of game,” Sumecta objected.

“He’s got a bit of needle against this one and so she’s got to go.”

“What was the needle?”

“Something that touched him where he lives. But Mr. B. has a long arm and a way of getting his own back.”

“Then she’s to be Mrs. Sagrado B.,” Sumecta said in English. “And what is Mr. K. to be?”

“He’s going to be beef-stoo,” Mr. Wiskey said in the same tongue. “And if he don’t like being in the soup, he can go in the cold-meat cart.”

“I wonder at Mr. B. starting this,” Sumecta said, “just at this time, when the other thing is getting ready. This woman business will make a stir.”

“Naturally, and while the stir is on, we’ll be visiting friends in Santa Barb. But here comes Ben. Viva Ben!

We want only Ben,

Ben, Ben and white men.”

The white men present joined in the cry of “Long live the Christian.” Captain Cary, edging back to his seat with his cigar, was doubtful for a moment if they meant him.

Ben, the hope both of his colour and his creed, came slouching into the ring with his back turned to the coloured men’s seats. He was a pale, very evil-looking man, with oblique eyes that were downcast: nothing short of an execution would have brought a smile on his mouth. He slipped off his shabby clothes and appeared in boxing tights. With his clothes on, he looked mean, but when stripped to fight, he looked dangerous. His arms and shoulders were knotted with muscles: he had a fine chest and magnificent pectoral muscles. When he had been gloved, he stood up to shake himself down: a more villainous looking ruffian never entered a ring.

“Will Ben be at Mr. K.’s party?” Sumecta asked.

“He will stir the beef-stoo,” Mr. Wiskey said.

Captain Cary took his seat beside Sard.

“You are just in time, sir,” Sard said. “What do you think of the Christian champion?”

“He’s like a man I saw hanged once at Hong Kong.”

“He’s got a fine chest, sir.”

“He’s well ribbed up, but what’s inside? If we have to meet at night, may it be moonlight and may I be first. I shall speak to my agents for giving me tickets for such a place. Now that I am here, I will stay, but I count it a degrading exhibition.” He settled himself into his seat, sucked his cigar and stared at Ben.

“The very twin-brother of the half-caste I saw hanged,” he growled. “He was one of those women-killers that go about cutting women up.” He stared again, with dislike of the entertainment mixed with determination to see it through, now that he was there.

“I’m not sure,” he added, “that he did not cut up the women and sell them as dogs’-meat. If he did, it was sheer cannibalism, since they eat dogs there, in some of the quarters. Seven women, altogether, he cut up.” He lapsed into silence, gazing over Ben’s head into that other scene in his memory of the long past.

Sard turned his attention to the two men in front of him, hoping for more information from them, but Mr. Wiskey was now deep in his pomegranate and Sumecta was smoking a cigarillo. Sard pieced together in his mind all that they had said. “After this fight, which you have arranged, so that the Carib shall lose, you two, with the help of a Mr. Abner, and of Ben Hordano, are going to a party to lay out a Mr. Kingsborough, and abduct a woman, presumably Mr. Kingsborough’s wife, for the benefit of a Mr. B. Who is Mr. B.? He is apparently in late middle age, and vindictive. He must be a dangerous criminal, since he has planned this abduction. He must be powerful, because here he is controlling at least four men to do something dangerous while he leaves the country. He must be wealthy or he could not control the men or leave the country. Where is he going, when he leaves the country? They mentioned ‘being safe in Santa Barb’: no doubt they will all go to Santa Barbara; to some part or port of it. There is room enough for them to hide, on that wild coast. At the same time, this is Mr. B.’s self-indulgence, not his real occupation, that is preparing something else, more important. ‘The other thing is getting ready.’ I wonder what thing. Before they mentioned ‘the other thing’ I should have said that they were all liquor-smugglers, but it sounds now more like politics of some sort: a revolution here, perhaps. And yet, these men are all criminals; they must be in law-breaking of some kind: liquor smuggling is likeliest. They bring the rum to leeward, land it somewhere here, carry it across Las Palomas province, over the frontier into Entre las Montanas, where they sell it, at three hundred per cent profit, among the gold-miners. Mr. Kingsborough has the cards stacked against him: I wonder what I can do to help him.”

While he was wondering, he turned leisurely round, first to his right, as a blind, then to his left, to see who was sitting in the back row about seven from the end. There were three or four people close together at that point: a young well-dressed native, with much silver in his hat; a sad-faced, thoughtful, middle-aged man, with a goatee beard: neither of those could be “old Abner.” Next to the middle-aged man was a man with a pale, predatory, grim face, having pale eyes, bony cheeks, a beak nose and a slit of a mouth: he seemed likelier. Next to him was a rosy-faced old man, white-haired and bearded, jovial and bright-eyed with good living, like the pictures of Father Christmas: could that be old Abner? The grim man seemed likeliest of the four.

“Bueno; mucho bueno,” Mr. Wiskey shouted to the referee, who now came into the ring to examine the boxer’s gloves. “You’re only one hour and thirty minutes late.”

The Master of the Ceremonies now followed the referee into the ring. He wore an evening suit, with a white waistcoat. A large silver disc hung on his chest from a broad red ribbon that went about his collar. He carried a white wand with a cross at its end, like a billiard cue rest. His hair was plastered down into his eyes with grease: he had the look of a retired cut-throat who was also a retired dancing-master: he looked graceful, cruel and fatigued. He explained that the moment was now come when the two great champions would display the splendour of the ancient athletic. The delay, he said, the deeply regretted delay in beginning, could only be described as an insult to such an audience: the people responsible for the delay had been discharged, so that it would never happen again. Now that all was ready, he would introduce the referee, Don Isidor ...

Don Isidor, a short, thickset, bull-necked, bullet-headed man, with a bronze-coloured face, scarred from chin to brow with a horn-rip, advanced into the ring with a set stage smile, amid thunders of applause. He had been a matador of renown in his day, but had been “unlucky with a bull” and had come down to this. He had something of a style and a tradition about him; a rose in his ear, the walk and swagger of a tenor, and the contest look of a bull entering a ring, looking for a fight.

“And now, gentlemen,” the Master of the Ceremonies said, “let me introduce to you the famous El Chico, of the Tierra Firme, and the noble Ben Hordano, of Mexico City, on my left, on my right; now, as I turn, on my right, on my left; champions both; noble exponents of the ancient athletic; gentlemen both, sportsmen both, and, let me add, gentlemen, quite ready both.”

He bowed, amid cheers, and stalked out of the ring: a bell gave a broken tinkle and all four seconds hopped out of the ring: the boxers stiffened, looked at each other, the gong banged for time, the men rose, their backless chairs were whisked away by the legs behind them, and the fight began.

Ben came out of his corner looking downwards out of the corners of both eyes. It was difficult for anyone to say what he was looking at or whether he saw what he looked at. He came out with a crouching shuffle, pale, very silent and very evil. He crossed his opponent, led without style, squared up to him and sparred for an opening. The Carib was a very different kind of fighter. Sard saw at once that El Chico was not only a superb boxer, but the master of Ben Hordano in every way. He smiled and shifted and was sleek with a body of a golden bronze. He played light and landed and got away, then came again, smiling, muttering little mocks in Spanish, and tapped Ben in the face, then warmed to his task and put in some hot ones. Ben came into a clinch, hit the Carib low in the clinch, hit him low again, hit him in the breakaway, grappled with him again and again hit him low. The negroes rose from their seats yelling “Foul!” The Carib grinned, shook Ben from him, punched him hard on both sides of the head, rushed him: they grappled again: he bored Ben to the ropes, they sidled along the ropes, putting in short-arm blows, Ben hitting low continually. When they broke, they paused and feinted, then rushed into a clinch: the Carib had the better of it; Ben came out of it uncertain. The Carib rushed and landed; Ben countered wildly, the Carib drew blood and shook him and followed him up. All the negroes rose again and cheered and cheered and cheered. Ben went into a clinch and hit low and hung on: the gong put an end to the round.

“What do you think of that?” Captain Cary asked.

“Hordano ought to be pitched out of the ring, sir, and the referee with him. I’ve never seen fouler fighting.”

Others thought the same, for at least a hundred negroes surged down to the ringside yelling “Foul! Foul!” Half-a-dozen of the bloods, in sailor suits, clambered up by the ropes to insult the referee, with dirty words ending in ucho and uelo. The referee seemed not to regard them for a moment: he stalked up and down, looking over their heads. Someone flung a bottle at him as he stalked, it hit him on the side of the head and knocked the rose out of his ear. He changed on the instant to a screaming madman; he picked up the bottle by the neck and beat the bloods off the ropes with it, and then yelled at them in a sort of frenzy of blasphemy till they went back to their seats. He stood glaring down at them till they were quiet, then, with a gesture he resumed his dignity, and told them that as the referee he would stop the bout if they did not behave more like caballeros. “I am the referee and I am Isidor, and no man shall dictate to me nor daunt me. Never had I thought that my fellow-citizens of Las Palomas would try to impose the mob-will upon the individual. On this individual they fail, for I am Isidor ...”

He broke off his remarks in order to walk across to Ben, to caution him for hitting low: in doing this, it occurred to him that he might seem less partial if he cautioned the Carib, so he walked over and cautioned El Chico also. The time between the rounds had lengthened out to some three minutes with all this, so that Ben was fresh again.

“So,” Don Isidor said, “all is quiet, is it not so? This is Las Palomas, I hope, not Europe with her savagery. It is thus that we deport ourselves, with calm, with the individual, with Isidor.” He gave a grand gesture to the time-keeper; the gong clanged: the second round began.

The gong had scarcely stopped before Ben was in the Carib’s corner on a roving cruise. Like many men, he boxed better for having had his stage fright warmed out of him in the knock and hurry of a first round. He hit rather low still; perhaps with his oblique and downcast eyes he could not do otherwise. He was clumsy but exceedingly strong. The Carib fought him off and made some play upon his face, but lightly as though the bout were a sparring match. Ben’s seconds shouted insults at him; the negroes yelled to him to go in and finish the dirty white dog. He boxed on gracefully, grinning alike at insults and cheers: he was playing with Ben. He drove Ben into a corner and clouted him right and left, Ben kneed him hard in the ribs and drove himself out of the corner; turning sharply, he fouled the Carib with both hands, kneed him in the ribs again and sent his right across as the Carib staggered. He was short with his blow; the Carib slipped aside, recovered, rushed and sent Ben flying through the ropes, off the platform, into his seconds’ arms. The negroes rose and yelled and sang; knives and revolvers came out on to the laps of the whites. The referee counted five very slowly while Ben climbed back into the ring. The Carib rushed: Ben stopped him: got into a clinch with him: refused to break: hung on to him: wore through the round with him hanging on his shoulder, while the negroes sank back into their seats with a moaning croon. Right at the end of the round the men broke: the Carib came in like a flash, Ben rallied to it, there was a hot exchange: then—Time.

Instantly there came yells of protest at the foulness of Ben’s fighting, but the yells this time were from a few, because all saw that it had been the Carib’s round. The referee let the protests pass by, turning his back on the negroes and talking about something else in a loud tone on the other side of the ring. He abused a sweetmeat seller for bringing flies into the arena; when he had finished with him he swaggered to the centre of the ring with a phrase:—“It is well known that I am for the sport, the sport English, the sport native, the sport antique, the sport all the time. I am not for the white, I am not for the coloured, I am for the sport: it is well known. Money speaks all languages, is it not so? The coloured man’s money is as good as the white’s; is it not so? Good, then; money speaks all languages, and I am for all money and all sport.”

This, because he was well known, was received with loud applause by the negroes. He ended by calling for some lemonade, sipping it, and making a joke about there being no little bit of good in it.

“I think we need stay for no more, Mr. Harker,” Captain Cary said. “The white man cannot win, and I do not think it decent to watch the Carib overcome him. Shall we go?”

“Certainly, sir, if you wish.”

They had risen from their seats and had reached the entrance alley close to their seats, when the gong struck and the two men rose for the third round. Both sailors paused where they stood to watch the start of the round. The fighters were now both warmed to their work, they went for each other hot and hot. Ben came out of an exchange with a bloody lip and looking wild; he clinched, hit in the clinch, was told to break, broke, but clinched again immediately. They wrestled round the ring together, then broke, with the look of strain at their nostrils and blood-smears on their ribs. The Carib feinted, then rushed, Ben ducked, and, as Sard saw, trod with all his weight on the Carib’s foot, the Carib tripped, then hit him as he fell, hit him again and fell over him. Ben got up and stood away, but the Carib lay still and was counted out. Sard saw him smile as he lay there.

Sard saw that Mr. Wiskey and Sumecta were standing at his elbow.

“That is what Mr. K. will get to-night,” Sumecta said in Spanish; “the right across.”

“Or the cross all right,” Mr. Wiskey said.

“Will you come then, Mr. Harker?” Captain Cary said.

They turned swiftly up the alley out of the arena, while Don Isidor held up his hand for silence. A roar of riot broke out behind them an instant later, when Ben was declared the winner. Sard, glancing back at the door, saw a mob of negroes at the ropes, and bottles, flasks, oranges, tortillas, pieces of water melon and bananas falling in the ring round Don Isidor, who was slipping out of the ring into a phalanx of whites already formed to receive him.

In the fresh air, outside the Circo, Captain Cary hailed a caleche.

“We’re well out of that,” he said. “I understood that it would be a display of athletics, but it was a very low piece of blackguardism: I call it degrading.”

“Sir,” Sard said, as they settled into their caleche, “you perhaps noticed the two men in front of us. They were talking in Spanish of raiding a Mr. Kingsborough to-night, with a gang, in order to kidnap a woman.”

“Kingsborough? I do not know the name.”

“He must be English or American, with that name, sir: and they talked as if they meant to do it.”

“Kingsborough? I suppose they were these liquor-smugglers, going to punish one of their gang?”

“No, sir: they called him Mr. Kingsborough, as though he were outside their gang. I wondered, sir, if you would mind enquiring at the Club, where Mr. Kingsborough lives, so that we could give him a warning.”

“I don’t know that I want to be mixed up in the business, Mr. Harker. But you say they mean to kidnap a woman?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It isn’t a very easy thing to do, in a fine modern town like Las Palomas.”

“They talked as though it would be easy to them, sir.”

“I fail to see how it can be easy, Mr. Harker. I should not like to have to try it, even with all hands. However, what is the time?”

“Twenty minutes to five, sir.”

“The tug will be alongside in an hour, and we aren’t hove short yet. What’s more: I don’t like the look of that sky at all.”

“No, sir.”

“Still, we ought to do what we can. We will just ask at the Club, if this person should be known. But it would be wiser, I should have thought, to go direct to the police.”

“Sir, if these people are liquor-smugglers, the chances are that they have bribed the police, or have an arrangement with them.”

“That is so. There was a man at the Club the other night who said openly that when he settled here, he asked how he could stock his cellar. They told him that it would be costly, as liquor is against the law, but that he could stock his cellar if he put his order through the chief of police. So he did, and the stuff was delivered. But that was last year, Mr. Harker. They have put in a new Chief of Police since; this Colonel Mackenzie, a Scotch-American: there is no such thing as squaring him.”

“Sir, we shall pass the Club on our way to the Palace of Justice. Might we pass word at both?”

“That is so. Heave round, then, Mr. Harker. Just pass the word to the driver. But kidnapping a woman, Mr. Harker ... I don’t believe that it could ever be done. I’ve never heard of it’s being done. What would be the object?”

“Partly the woman, sir, and partly (as far as I could gather) to pay off some old score.”

“Well, a man would have to be a pretty thorough-paced scoundrel even to plan a thing like that; but the doing of it is what I don’t see. How would it be done?”

“Sir, they said that Ben Hordano would be there, so I suppose they mean to knock her senseless: give her the knock-out blow on the chin and then lash her up, like a hammock.”

“No, no, Mr. Harker; men are not like that.”

“Sir, Ben Hordano is not a man, but a dangerous animal. The others are the same: they neither think nor act like men.”

“Yes, but, Mr. Harker, a woman is not so easy to attack as a man. You ask one of these big policemen: they would rather tackle three men than one woman. I’ve known it take seven policemen to take one woman to prison: she was a little woman, too; but she kept them guessing and one of them was streaming with blood.”

“Was that in England, sir?”

“Yes, in London.”

“They are very forbearing men, sir, the London police.”

“They know when they meet their match, Mr. Harker; but here we are at the stairs.”

“The Otoque is in, sir; we have a fair chance of our mail.”

“There’s nothing much coming to me, that I’ve any reason to look forward to. The post is like hope, Mr. Harker, best in youth.”

“There is Mr. Brentano, from the agents, sir. He has some letters.”

“Where?”

“There, sir, to port, talking to a priest.”

“Wait one minute, Mr. Harker, he may have some news for us. Ho, Mr. Brentano, were you waiting here to intercept me?”

Mr. Brentano left the priest and came running up to Captain Cary, who had now dismounted from the caleche. Mr. Brentano was a middle-aged, foxy-looking man with an astute mind.

“Ah, Captain Cary,” he said, “the boatmen told me that you had not gone aboard. I hoped to catch you here as you went off. By the way, here is some mail for the Pathfinder. There is this priest, a Father Garsinton, from the mining district, who came in, just as the office closed, to beg a passage to Santa Barbara.”

“Indeed.”

“He has a letter from one of our clients, one of our most important clients.”

“Do I understand that he wants to come in the Pathfinder?”

“Well; he comes from one of our very best clients, Captain Cary, so if you could manage to strain a point.... He is a priest, used to every kind of hardship; you could put him in the coal-hole, anywhere, it would make no difference to him, he would give no trouble. I don’t suppose he’s very rich, but of course he would pay his passage. You see, Captain Cary, it is a very special case. He is a poor man. He has only a month’s leave of absence. He wants to reach Santa Barbara to settle the affairs of his mother, who has died there. He has missed the Alvarado. He is an Englishman and his poor sister is in Santa Barbara all alone.”

Captain Cary bit his glove, and showed a poor mouth.

“I suppose we’ll have to take him,” he growled to Sard; “I hate priests: they always take snuff. But I’ll have no nonsense about fish on Fridays.”

Mr. Brentano led up and introduced Father Garsinton. Sard noticed the priest particularly. He was a big bull of a man, with immense chest and shoulders, a short, thick neck, a compact, forceful head and little glittering eyes. There was something magnificent in his bearing. He was of about the middle age, near that time in life when muscle goes to flesh, but still on the sinewy side of it. At a first glance, his face, which was fresh-coloured, looked wholesome, hearty and healthy; but at a second glance Sard felt that there was something wanting. There was a greyish puffiness under the eyes, and something unnatural, or at least unusual, about the eyes themselves. The man’s face was unusual, the man was unusual, he was an odd-looking man, with enormous bodily strength to make his oddness felt. Sard, who had not seen any such Englishman before, realised that a man so odd would choose a way of life followed by few Englishmen. Father Garsinton wore new blacks; he was smart, for a priest from a mining camp; his cloth smelt new; his voice, as he thanked Captain Cary, was soft and gracious, but his eye was sidelong as he spoke, taking stock of Sard.

“Mr. Harker,” Captain Cary said, “will you be away, then to make those enquiries, and then follow us on board?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you should hear of those people, don’t let them entangle you into delaying. There’s a norther coming and I cannot wait for you. I would not like you to lose your passage.”

“I’ll not lose my passage, sir.”

“I see the tug’s down the quay there, with steam up. Now, Mr. Garsinton, have you any gear to go aboard?”

“Yes, Captain Cary, a small trunk and that packing-case.”

“That packing-case? That sort of deckhouse by the bollard? It looks like a pantechnicon van. What is in it?”

“Two sets of Las Palomas crockery for my sister, with the necessary packing.”

“You’ll have to pay me freight on it. It will take a yard-tackle to get it over the side. Now we must get a boatman and a couple of Carib boys to get it aboard for us.”

Sard in his caleche was by this time turning about to go to the hotel. He paid particular attention to the packing-case, which shone there in new white wood beside the bollard. He thought that it looked big for two sets of crockery, but supposed that the stuff was dunnaged against the sea. He drove to the hotel.

At the hotel, the woman in charge remembered the name of Kingsborough.

“Yes,” she said, “a lady and her brother, rather more than three weeks ago; they were here for two nights, on the first floor, in Rooms B and D. Let me see. February the 20th and 21st, it was. They came in on the Palenque from San Agostino. They were going to stop somewhere here, he said. He came in for letters a day or two after they left the hotel.”

Sard thanked her, turned to the 20th February and saw the names:

Hilary Kingsborough	}	Br. subjects, in trans.
Margarita Kingsborough	}

written by the man in what is called a Civil Service hand. “Here they are,” he said. “Do you happen to know where they went when they left?”

The woman turned up a register. “No,” she said. “They breakfasted here on the 22nd, and then left the hotel. I’m not here in the mornings, but he said they were going to stop here for a little. They were taking a furnished flat, the upstairs maid thought.”

“Do you happen to know what he is doing here?”

“Writing something for some examination, so someone said. He was a very young gentleman.”

“What was she like?”

“A very nice lady.”

“Could your colleague, who saw them go, tell me where they went, when they left here? I want to give them a message.”

“The other clerk won’t be here till midnight,” the woman said. “Perhaps you could come back, then?”

He drove on to the Club, much pleased to be on the track of these Kingsboroughs. There was something odd about the names of Hilary and Margarita. “ ‘A very young gentleman,’ ” he repeated, “and ‘a very nice lady.’ And there, as it happens, is their enemy.”

There, on the pavement before a café on the water-front, was Mr. Wiskey dancing a Hottentot breakdown to his friends. Mr. Wiskey’s hands were behind his back, jutting out his coat-tails; his head was bowed forward because of his boil; he was singing as he danced:

“O, I’m a lady,

A Hottentot lady,

A one-time-piecee lubly gal O.”

His friends kept time for him as he danced by clacking spoons on their front teeth.

Sard wondered how it had come about that a very nice lady and a very young gentleman had roused the employer of such a crew to take extreme measures against them. He reckoned that it would be quite impossible for him to find these Kingsboroughs and then visit Los Xicales. “The thing has always mocked me,” he said, “perhaps all things do, if you think too much of them.”

He entered the Club just as the clocks struck five.

“Why, for the love of Mike,” the Club porter said, “if it ain’t Mr. Harker! Why, sir, how are you? Maybe you’ll not remember me, but I was in the crowd with you in the Venturer one trip, ’way back.”

Sard saw before him a young man of about twenty-five with a smile which brought him back to memory. It was Richard Shullocker, a young American who had been stranded as a lad by the death of his parents during an epidemic in one of the fever ports. He had shipped himself aboard the Venturer as an ordinary seaman, so as to reach a windward port from which he could sail for Boston. In spite of his age, he had done very well. He had been known on board as the Big Smiled Kid, for his smile stretched from ear to ear and never ceased in any trouble or any weather. Now here he was, prosperous and ambitious, a Club porter in Las Palomas.

“Why, Richard Shullocker,” Sard said. “So you are here. I’ve often wondered what became of you. You’re looking well.”

“Yes, sir. This place suits me. But I’m through here this month. I’ve figured out this hotel and club business. I’m going to start business in New York City on my own account. And I suppose you are Captain Harker now?”

“No, just mate; with Captain Cary still. And now I want you to help me. Do you know of any man in this Club, a courtesy member probably, of the name of Kingsborough?”

“Why, sure, Mr. Harker. A young fellow, Mr. Hilary Kingsborough. If that’s the man, he was in here for his mail only half an hour ago. He’s been here about three weeks. He’s staying at a place up the coast, General Martinez’ place, Los Xicales.”

“Los Xicales,” Sard said, startled. “That house near the beach?”

“Yes. Colonel Mackenzie hired it for him; the police colonel. He’s staying there with his sister, who is sure one lovely woman; but they’re going from here to-morrow, down to Ytá-Ytá.”

“Where do they come from?”

“England, I guess. He writes up these old Spanish buildings and his sister draws them. She’s just plum lovely.”

“I want to get out to them, to give them a warning. I believe that they’re threatened by a gang of rough-necks. I’m sailing at six and have very little time. While I go out to them (I know the way to Los Xicales), will you go to the Palace of Justice and ask Colonel Mackenzie to have a patrol along there to-night?”

“Sure, Mr. Harker, I’ll go right now. But how are you going to Los Xicales? Not in that shay, I guess, if you’re in any hurry. You’d best take my bicycle if you’re hurrying. Say, George, rouse up the bicycle for Mr. Harker.”

While the negro went into the basement for the bicycle, Sard said that the crowd on Las Palomas beach seemed tougher than formerly.

“That is so,” Richard said. “These rum-runners have made it a tough joint. They run rum in and they run guns out. That mush-nosed maggot, Don José, is doing it all, to rouse up trouble in Santa Barbara.”

“Don José, that scum, against the Dictator?”

“He ain’t called a scum here in Las Palomas, Mr. Harker. This rum-running has made him a very rich man and his stock is away up in G. You’ll find that Don José will have another try for Santa Barbara before long.”

“I’m bound for Santa Barbara,” Sard said. “Would Mr. Kingsborough be mixed up with, or against, the Don José gang?”

“I guess not,” Richard said. “One can’t ever tell. He wouldn’t be with him, that’s sure: Mr. Kingsborough’s a gentleman. But here’s your bicycle, and if you’re sailing at six, I guess you’ll have to roll your tail like the Arab or you’ll not make it. Don’t you heed your caleche, I’ll square your driver.”

“One other thing,” Sard said. “Do you know a priest, a Father Garsinton? A lone rogue bull of a man?”

“No, sir: he don’t come bullin’ around here any.”

“Well, thank you for your help,” Sard said. He swung the bicycle round and rode off, thinking that he would have to sprint to be on board by six.

“So,” he thought, “I lied. The dreams are true. Here I am, led to this house, and by what strange ways. She will be there then, stopping with the Kingsboroughs. Could she be this Miss Kingsborough? But that cannot be, of course; Juanita de la Torre cannot well become Margarita Kingsborough. But let that wait. The dreams are true. She will be there somehow.”

He rode through the market-place over a mess of corn-sheath and trodden pumpkin, and away through the North gate to the savannah. Outside the walls there were a few houses, then a few market gardens, then the rolling sage-green savannah to the forest. The road was not macadam but dirt-track, with soft going, after the first mile. The houses ceased with the macadam, then came nothing but a ruined hut or two, and from time to time a stone cross, with a tin mug of holy water, a bunch of tinsel flowers, and an inscription, begging all who passed to pray for the soul of such an one, who had been killed there. Most of these many dead had been killed by Indians in the three dreadful raids of Capa Roja, when Sard had been a little child. Seven stone crosses together marked where Capa Roja had with his own hands martyred “seven most Christian virgins” as recently as 1872. Indian trouble had not ceased there until 1876.

Passing these, Sard rode on up a rise into the wild, mainly upon grass. Las Palomas had shrunk away from this northern tract, perhaps because of these old Indian killings; the savannah was as it had been before the white man had landed, an expanse of grass which seemed always alive from the wind. On a rise, the forest hove in sight, stretching across Sard’s track from the sea to the mountains. Clumps of forest stood out in the savannah like bull-bisons in advance of the herd: the sun was in their tops in a way which told Sard that he had not a moment to lose. “Still,” he said to himself, “I am going to Los Xicales, to her. Time will not matter beyond a certain point.”

Out of the forest a peon in a scarlet serape came loping on a pinto pony. He came with a jingle of plate, for horse, man and trappings were hung with discs and dangles beaten out of broad silver Mexican dollars. He rode, like a part of his horse, with matchless grace and swagger. He had a xicale flower in his hat, which he wore sideways, so as not to crush the yellow cigarettes behind one of his ears. He was probably an estancia peon, but he had the manners of a Master of the Horse to a Queen. “Xicales,” Sard thought, “you have come from there. Con Dios, caballero.”

The peon gravely saluted as he loped by, thinking that without doubt the English were mad, but that without doubt such was God’s will.

Almost immediately after the xicale flower had passed, the track, which had been trending inland (for the advantage of the rise in the Indian time) swerved seaward sharply, so that Sard as he rode had a glimpse of the sailing ship anchorage, and a part of Jib and Foresail Quay where the tug still lay at her berth. “There, Sard Harker,” he said to himself, “that has been your art hitherto and now you are a master of it. How much longer are you going to use your life in box-hauling another man’s yards around? Not long after you find ‘her,’ I know, and perhaps you will find ‘her’ this hour.”

The forest glowed in its tops across his path: myriads of its birds came in to roost. “I shall have to sprint all I know,” Sard thought, “if I am to reach Los Xicales and be back on board before we sail.”

Behind him, from out in the anchorage, but very clear in the quiet of the evening, came a cheer, followed by the chorus of men singing.

“There it is,” he said; “they are heaving in already. It must be half-past five already. I must set my stunsails or be done for.”

The glow became intenser upon the trees as he drew nearer to them, then, quite suddenly, he shot out of the glow into the gloom of the forest, which struck cold as well as gloom. On his left were pine trees all sighing together, on his right were Turkey oaks all hoary and evil with Spanish moss. They looked like evil Mr. Wiskeys grown bigger. They seemed to thrust out their heads and to wag their beards and to be wicked to the core. Through the crowds of these trees, Sard followed the track, in sound of the beating of the sea, till he dismounted at the lodge beside the gates. Wired to the side of the lodge was a white wooden roofing shingle marked in pale blue letters with the words “Los Xicales.” It had a look of having no one there, of being to let. As Sard looked at it, he felt an oppression in the air, as though all the life had gone out of it. “Here’s the norther,” he said; “and as it is coming on so slowly, it is going to be bad.”

Sard propped his bicycle against the gates and hammered on the lodge-door with his knife-handle.

Nobody answered. The door, which stood slightly ajar, let out a smell of stale tortilla. Sard could see little pale ants wandering on the floor within. He hammered again and again and called. Presently a slatternly-young negress, in a blue cotton gown patched with sacking, came up among the pine trees, and grinned at Sard like an idiot.

“O Jesu,” she said, “O Jesu!”

“Can I go to the house? Is anybody there?”

“The gates are always locked.”

“Yes, but I want to go to the house.”

“Tehee.”

“May I go to the house, to see Mr. Kingsborough?”

“O Jesu.”

“I am going to the house. See that no one steals this bicycle, or you’ll be a sick negress, mucha, mucha.”

He crossed the fence by the gap (the fence was indeed mainly gap) and set off down the weed-blinded drive under pines which had been tapped and were now either dead or dying. The effect was dismal in that muggy air, but Sard’s heart beat high with the expectation of adventure. Beyond all doubt, this was the house of his dream, the dreams were true, and he was going to meet her the very thought of whom made all that inner life of which no one had any suspicion. The turn in the drive brought him within sight of the house. He stood still, at the turning, to take stock of it. Then he went boldly up the steps and rang the bell.

An old white-haired negro, with charming manners, admitted and announced him. In a moment he returned, to say that Mr. Kingsborough would see him, at once, if he would follow. Sard followed, along the hall, which was paved, for the coolness, and grass-matted for ease in walking. The hall was bare of furniture save for an old Spanish chest, painted with the life of St. Dominic, which stood under a window, with its legs in glass jars (against the ants). Like all men accustomed to take bearings, Sard fixed the details of it. It was a long hall running along the length of the house, with doors opening off it, and a staircase at the western end. The old negro major-domo opened a door a few paces from this staircase, and announced him:

“Señor Don Harker.”

Sard went in and instinctively put back a hand to close the door. He felt the door as the negro closed it; he was amazed at its weight: it was black maruca wood from the house of some conquistador.

The room to which he entered was a long room at the southern corner of the house. The wall to his right, as he entered, contained a French window opening upon the verandah. A woman stood at the door of the French window, half in the verandah. He could not see her face, since it was turned from him, but there was something about her that made his heart stand still. She spoke as he closed the door:

“I will water the xicales, Hilary,” she said, “and come back when you are alone.” Her voice rang in his brain like a memory: she closed the glass door behind her, and passed by the verandah steps into the garden out of sight.

Sard turned to his left. A young man had risen from a chair to greet him. Sard looked at him eagerly for some trait or feature that would be like the face he sought, but the face was new to him: it was the face of a smiling young man, fond of fun and ease, perhaps twenty-five years old. Sard envied him the fun and ease, but felt that the lad was a child, compared with himself, who had dealt with the sea for ten years.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Harker?” the young man said.

Sard told what he had heard at the ringside and described the two men. The young man listened attentively and showed no sign of fear, but seemed puzzled.

“I know nobody like those two men,” he said; “and as for anyone called B., or Sagrado B., in Santa Barbara, I know no one of that name nor in that place. We have never been near Santa Barbara.”

“Nor met either the Dictator or Don José?”

“Never. I know nothing of either, except the gossip that one hears.”

“The danger threatened your sister more than yourself, Mr. Kingsborough. I gathered from what was said that this man in Santa Barbara had a grudge against your sister, perhaps of some years’ standing.”

“I think that’s out of the question.”

“There is no other Miss Kingsborough here, or any Spanish lady?”

“Spanish lady? No, nor other Miss Kingsborough.”

“They meant your sister, then.”

“Yes, but that is impossible. Of course, I am very much obliged to you for coming to warn me. It was very good of you. Do you think that we are in danger?”

“They were a bad two, mixed up with others worse; and we have a saying, ‘It’s better to be sure than sorry.’ ”

“Well; thanks. Only, I must say that I do not understand it.”

“I see, sir,” Sard said, “that you do not take it very seriously. Well, perhaps it is best not to cross rivers till you reach the water.”

“Threatened men live long.”

“Not in seaport towns,” Sard answered.

“Well,” Hilary said, smiling, “what do you think we ought to do?”

“I have passed word to the police to stand by,” Sard said. “But you know how much that is worth, among these Occidentales. I would say this, Mr. Kingsborough: take your sister in to the hotel in town, the Santiago, until you leave Las Palomas. I understand that that will be to-morrow.”

“You really think that the danger is as great as that?”

“I don’t know the danger,” Sard said, “only the risk. That is what I should do, if it were myself and a sister of mine.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harker. Will you smoke?”

“Thank you, I don’t smoke.”

“Will you drink something?”

“I don’t drink.”

“I think you said, Mr. Harker, that you belonged to a ship here?”

“Yes, sir, the Pathfinder, sailing now for Santa Barbara. And I must go aboard now or lose my passage. So I will say good-bye, Mr. Kingsborough. I hope to hear some day that nothing has come of all this.”

“Is your ship a steamer, did you say?”

“The ship in the sailing ship berths there, about to sail.”

“Well, a pleasant voyage to you. And thank you again for coming to warn me. I’ll see you to the gate.”

Outside, the sun had westered so that the light was off the house. The oppression in the air, added to the gloom of the evening, made the place menacing.

At the angle of the house, the woman was watering the xicales. She wore white gardening gauntlets and a sun hat. Sard felt his heart leap up with expectation. He took a step towards her.

“This way, Mr. Harker,” Hilary said, correcting him. “That way leads to the garden.”

The woman had turned from them; he did not see her face; she disappeared round the angle of the house.

“Excuse me,” Sard said. “But is there no Spanish lady here?”

“Spanish lady?” Hilary asked. “You asked me that before. No. You may mean Tia Eusebia: she’s coloured.”

“You’ll speak to your sister about this warning,” Sard said. “And tell her everything that I have told you.”

Hilary answered coldly that naturally he would. The thought came to Sard with the pain of a blow that the dreams were all lies, and that once again he had failed to find her.

“Is anything the matter, Mr. Harker?” Hilary asked.

“A little queer,” Sard said. “Don’t come any further. I’ll let myself out. I must hurry. But tell me ... Are you Spanish?”

“No,” Hilary answered, looking at him oddly, “I’m English.”

“Right, then. Good-bye. And I hope all will go well.”

“Good-bye and thanks.”

Sard hurried away, trying to pull himself together. He knew that Hilary thought him mad or drunk. Hilary watched him as far as the gates: then waved a hand and turned back to the house. “Odd beggar,” Hilary thought, “a very odd beggar. I didn’t half like the looks of him. He seemed to me to be as mad as a hatter. And asking me if I am Spanish. And whether I kept a Spanish lady!”

At the gates Sard stopped, saying to himself that he must go back and warn the woman. “That boy does not believe,” he said; “he thinks me daft; and she is in danger. And beside all that, I must speak to her. I must ask her if she be that one; for I believe she is: I believe she must be. And yet she cannot be Juanita: the name and everything else is changed. Her brother thought me mad when I asked if he were Spanish. Yet she was like enough to her: and then there was my dream. Changed or not, I must know, one way or the other; and besides, she must be warned. She is older and wiser than this boy and she must be warned of the danger.”

He knew very well that if he went back, he would meet a Hilary convinced of his madness and not speak to Miss Kingsborough, yet he half turned. As he did so there came from the anchorage far behind him, yet very clearly, a beating of the Pathfinder’s bells as though for a fire. In an instant’s hush after the stopping of the bells there was a shout, which he heard but could not distinguish, followed by three roaring cheers. He knew what it was. The Pathfinder, being about to sail, was cheering all the ships in port. The cheering was followed by a carillon of bells and a thunder of cheering as both anchorages made reply.

“There it is,” Sard muttered, “I have twenty minutes before they man the windlass. I’m due on the fo’c’sle-head to see the anchor grow. I’ll do it yet.”

He might have done it, no doubt, but when he reached the iron gates, his bicycle was gone.