A hand, cold as ice, was clapped upon the old man’s white and trembling lips.
“Father, I implore you, do not summon him,” prayed Julia, striving to drag the aged Spaniard back into her cabin. “He cannot serve you now. For Mother Mary’s sake, I beg of you to leave him to his prayers. He has sore need of them.”
Her protest came too late. In the dim, gray light of the hatchway the girl caught sight of a face which even in that awful hour wore an inscrutable, evil smile, as if the diabolical spirit of the storm had rejoiced the soul of Juan Rodriquez.
“We’re driving fast, Juan, upon an unknown coast,” said Don Rodrigo, coolly, a detaining arm thrown around his daughter’s waist. “You’re lithe and muscular, and come of fearless stock. I’ve seen you in the water at Seville.” At this moment the increasing uproar aboard ship compelled the old man to raise his thin voice to a shout. Drawing from his breast a package wrapped in oil-skin, he thrust it toward the out-stretched hand of his secretary. “Here is my patent from the King of Spain. ’Twill serve as Julia’s title to the mines—to the greater glory of our Mother Church! And, for the sake of heathen souls beyond, your arm, my Juan, must save my daughter from these hungry seas. I say to you—”
“Father, as you love me, as you hope for Paradise, put no trust in this man’s loyalty! If you must die, I do not care to live. A thousand deaths were better than a life saved by a—”
At that instant a crash, as if the storm had served as usher to the crack of doom, drove the word she would have uttered back upon her tongue. Don Rodrigo’s white head was turned to crimson by its impact with an iron-jointed beam, and, plunging forward, he lay dead beside his daughter’s feet. Doña Julia tottered forward a step or two, and then fell swooning into Juan’s arms.
CHAPTER IX
IN WHICH TWO CHILDREN OF THE SUN ASTONISH A
SCOUNDREL
Before the day was ended the winds and waves had signed a truce, but on the beach, far to the westward of the Mississippi’s mouth, lay ghastly trophies of their recent war. In a vain effort to propitiate the demon of the storm—according to the Portuguese sailors: to lighten the vessel, the captain would have said—cables, spars, water-casks, kits and chests of varying size, puncheons of wine, bags of sea-biscuit, cannon, powder, and stone ballast had been thrown overboard in a futile effort to float the shattered ship from a sunken reef. A portion of this impotent sacrifice the sullen surf had uplifted upon its crest, and, rushing shoreward, had tossed it spitefully upon the sands.
As the hours dragged on, while the storm, in full retreat, hurried its black battalions toward the west, the moaning beach became a resting-place for grimmer flotsam than sailor’s kit or broken spar. Trusting to the stanchness of their ships and the favor of their saints, the Spanish seamen in those adventurous days but seldom learned to swim. In constant peril from the hungry waves, forever searching unknown seas, where shipwreck menaced him at every hour, the Spaniard or the Portuguese would drown, amazed to find no saving potency in strings of beads, no buoyancy in dangling crucifix.
When the ship Concepcion, abandoned by the saints, struck on a rock, concealed beneath the waves by Satan’s crafty hand, there was only one man aboard the vessel who had learned to breast the surf with strength and skill sufficient for a crisis such as this—and he was a white-faced landsman, who had spent his life with pen and books, learning nothing of the sea save what had come to him when bathing in the sunny waters of Seville.