“Where, in the devil’s name, could she possibly have gone to? She might have been to Cape Horn and back before this. Miserable fool that I was to trust the craft with that thirsty, thick-headed Gibbs! Diavolo! he may have been captured, and if he has, I hope his neck has been stretched like a shred of jerked beef.”
Even while he was talking a bell struck near the settee, and, putting his ear again to the tube, the hoarse voice said,
“I can make her out now, señor. She’s just caught the strong young breeze, and is, hull up, coming along with the bonnet off her fore-sail and a reef in her main-sail! There’s a felucca to windward of her, which I take to be the ‘Panchita!’”
“Ah ha!” laughed the individual in the room. “The ‘Centipede’ is safe, then; and I am to have the pleasure, too, of a visit from the Tuerto, the mercenary old owl, with his account of sales and his greed. But let me once catch him foul, and, my one-eyed friend, I’ll treat you to such a dance that you won’t need shoes!”
Here he glanced with a meaning look at the silk rope swaying from the beam above his head, and the laugh of satisfaction which followed was not one a timid man would care to hear in a dark night; nor did it come from his heart, as any one might have discovered from the ferocious gleam of inward passion which shot out in the cold sparkle of his eyes and flitted away over his grating teeth.
Controlling his feelings, however, and stepping out on the veranda, he drew aside the curtains and sung out to the men in the huts, “One of you fellows, tell the boatswain I want him.”
The men started up, and a moment after a man in a blue jacket stood out from one of the sheds and threw up his hand to his straw hat.
THE “PANCHITA”