The moonlight was still extraordinarily powerful, and gave a fallen day to this southern world.
As Commendone shot the water out of his ears, he looked upon the limp, prone figure of the man he had rescued.
"Dame!" he cried; "it is the torturer that we've been overboard for. Pity we didn't let him drown."
John Hull had turned the figure of the Spaniard upon its stomach and was working vigorously at the arms, using them like pump-handles, as the sailors got their oars into the rowlocks again, and pulled back towards the shivering, silver ship near quarter of a mile away.
"I'll bring the life back to him, master," said John Hull. "He's warm now—there! He's vomited a pint or more of sea-water as I speak."
"I doubt he was worth saving," Johnnie said in a low voice to his servant's ear. "Still, he is saved, and I suppose a man like this hath a soul?"
Hull looked at Commendone in surprise. He knew nothing about the man they had rescued; he could not understand why his master spoke in this way.
But with his usual dog-like fidelity he nodded an assent, though he did not cease the pumping motion of the half-drowned man's arms.
"Perhaps he hath no soul, master," Hull said, "you know better than I. At any rate, we have got him out of this here sea, and so praise God Who hath given us the sturdiness to do it."
Commendone looked at his henchman and then at the slowly reviving Spaniard.