“I wish I could remember,” he muttered musingly to himself, “which of those sisters this bit of cambric belonged to, marked 49 with an E.––Ellen or Eliza––hum! They would die––silly things!––tried to stab me! Ho! what fun! Never left me even a miniature, either, for my collection. ‘Bueno!’ There’s more fish in the sea––and under it too!” he concluded, with an unpleasant elevation of his eyebrows.
By this time he had approached the open window, and, shoving the delicate fabric daintily in his pocket, he gave a slight yawn and looked out. Before him lay the deep blue basin of the inlet, with a couple of boats hauled up on the shore; a few idle sailors moving about, or squatted beneath the sheds playing cards or sewing. Without letting his eye rest more than a moment on this scene, he turned and gave a long, earnest gaze between an opening of the rocks to seaward. Then, with an angry frown, he approached the table, poured out a cup of black coffee, threw rather than dropped in a lump of sugar, and sat himself down for his morning’s meal. He had scarcely, however, gulped down his cup of coffee and choked after it a slice of toast, than he pushed away the breakfast things, snapped his teeth together like a steel clasp, biting a tooth-pick in twain by the effort; and then, tossing the pieces away, he dashed his hand into the cigar-box, extracted one, touched it to the pan of coals, and began to smoke savagely. At first the grateful smoke appeared to soothe his chafed spirit, for he threw himself lazily into a large cane-bottomed settee, and, stretching out his legs, seemed to enjoy the tranquil scene around him with uninterrupted pleasure. But soon a scowl darkened his face; he dropped his cigar on the floor, and springing to his feet as if touched by a galvanic battery, he snatched down a telescope from the wall, steadied it at the window-sash, and peered again long and anxiously to windward. He saw nothing, however, save the long, glassy, unbroken undulations of a calm tropical sea, rolling away off beyond the ledge under a burning sun; no sign of a breeze––not even a cat’s-paw; and only now and then the leap of a deep-sea fish sparkling for a moment in the air, and some sluggish gulls and pelicans sailing and diving about the reef for their prey. Shutting up the glass with a crash that made the joints ring, he strode to the settee, where hung several knotted bell-ropes, and, seizing one, gave it a sharp jerk. Then putting his ear to an aperture in the wall, where was a hollow cane tube like the mouth of a speaking-trumpet, he listened attentively till a hoarse whisper uttered the word,
“Señor.”
Putting his mouth to the tube, he said,
“Can you make out the ‘Centipede’ from the crag station?”
“Not sure, sir, this morning; but last evening, at sunset, I saw a sail which I took to be her. The sea-breeze is just beginning to make, and if she’s to windward of Punta Arenas she’ll soon heave in sight.”
This colloquy was held in Spanish; and when the signal-man had ceased speaking, the interlocutor lit another cigar mechanically, kicked a foot-stool out of his way like a foot-ball, and thus communed with himself as he rapidly paced between the table and the veranda:
“Fourteen weeks ago yesterday since the schooner was off Matanzas; not a word of news to cheer me through all that cursed fever; the spring trade done, and the track deserted by this time!”
Then pausing in his walk, he stopped at the chart-stand, and unrolling a map, he went on: