"I promise to obey you, sir Captain. You are a really good man! Heaven will benefit you for the protection you accord me. I shall go on praying for you and myself!"
"Very well; so pluck up, Señorita, and soon the fun will be over!"
He remounted to the deck. He glanced over the bay, and went to the stem with his marine glass, looking over the oncoming "scow" contemptuously to view the shore near the consul's habitation. A longboat, manned by twelve oarsmen, and carrying the English flag at the stern, was seen to quit the pier and steer for the Burlonilla, making good time.
The port was "getting lively."
Though things were going on nicely enough, Gladsden did not mean to be taken unawares, and, not to be blamed for neglecting to take any precaution, he had a cutlass and a brace of boarding pistols laid handily on the sliding cover of the companionway. In those waters one never knows how matters may turn out, and, to prevent the turning out being unpleasant, a man is easiest when thoroughly on his guard.
Though the English representative's boat had left the shore some time after the native one, it was not slow in overhauling it, outstripping it without deigning to hail it or otherwise notice it, and ran alongside the Little Joker on the seaward side, while the other boat was rather far away.
"Glad to see you, Mr. Lyons," said Gladsden, receiving the deputy-consul, warmly.
"Yes, here I am, Captain. You can do anything you like with me, you know. Only, as your messenger was in a hurry to be off, I am very little informed upon passing matters, and I may be able to act better in your interest if you acquaint me how things stand and move."
Gladsden briefly told the story.
"Is that all!" exclaimed deputy-consul Lyons, laughing finely, as Jews do. "Don't you be alarmed, but let me deal with this fellow. The friend of don Stefano must be a suspicious character, and that he is the chief of the in-country night marchers, and also the doer of little piracies with this same brigantine does not, therefore, startle me. But your visitors are hailing you. You might receive them with that bulldog sweetness of demeanour which characterise us British," he went on, smiling shyly. "Before all, put away those weapons, quite useless. The affair will finish with more of a display of brass than steel or lead."