“Electric lights!” cried Fitz.
“Oh yes, they’ve got ’em, and tram-cars too. They are pretty wide-awake in these mushroom Spanish Republic towns.”
“Then they will be advanced enough,” thought Fitz, “for me to get help to make my way to rejoin my ship. Sooner or later my chance must come.”
Within an hour the soft warm wind had dropped, and the captain gave his orders, to be followed by the rattling out of the chain-cable through the hawse-hole. The schooner swung round, and Fitz had to bring the glass to bear from the other side of the deck to make out the twinkling lights of the semi-Spanish town.
Everything was wonderfully still, but it was an exciting time for the lad as he leaned against the bulwarks quite alone, gazing through the soft mysterious darkness at the distant lights.
There were thoughts in his breast connected with the lowering down of one of the boats and rowing ashore, but there was the look-out, and the captain and mate were both on deck, talking together as they walked up and down, while instead of the men going below and seeming disposed to sleep, they were lounging about, smoking and chatting together.
And then it was that the middy began to think about one of the four life-buoys lashed fore and aft, and how it would be if he cut one of them loose and lowered himself down by a rope, to trust to swimming and the help of the current to bear him ashore.
His heart throbbed hard at the idea, and then he turned cold, for he was seaman enough to know the meaning of the tides and currents. Suppose in his ignorance instead of bearing him ashore they swept him out to sea? And then he shuddered at his next thought.
There were the sharks, and only that evening he and Poole had counted no less than ten—that is to say, their little triangular back-fins—gliding through the surface of the water.
“No,” he said to himself, “I shall have to wait;” and he started violently, for a voice at his elbow said—