“Captain Bolton.”
“Well, will you let me send a letter by him to Gompez?”
“Yes, if you give it me at once.”
He began to write it at once and, as before, found difficulty in framing it, and tore up several sheets. “I can trust your captain to deliver it unopened?” he asked.
“Of course you can. But I must ask you to get it done,” I said impatiently.
He made a fresh start; wrote a dozen lines or so, and again tore up the sheet, this time with a muttered oath of vexation.
“I am sorry to try your patience so, Mr. Donnington; but I have been so disturbed that I am scarcely master of my thoughts. Will you let me send this to your boat later on? Or will you write your instructions to your captain and let me send them both together?”
“Yes, that will do as well,” I said.
He got up from the table and made way for me. I began a note to the skipper telling him to hunt up the Rampallo and take off Burroughs and the men; and was proceeding to add that he should then steam to Plymouth, when it occurred to me that I might possibly persuade Miralda and her mother to leave on the Stella at once.
I paused and by chance glanced in a mirror just opposite me, in which I saw Barosa. He was watching me with a look of cunning, gloating triumph that in an instant my suspicions awoke. He was fooling me. All his show of concern for his companions, his inability to master his thoughts, his suggestion about wrecking the Rampallo and all the rest of it, were tricks, nothing more, to fool me to put this order into his hands so that he might get his friends at liberty.