Then he limped up the stairway leaving red marks behind him, and made a little deprecatory gesture when he appeared before Dom Clemente. The latter looked at him in a fashion which sent a thrill of dismay through him.
"I hear you have hurt your foot," he said. "Take that bandage off."
Pacheco, who dare not hesitate, sat down and unrolled the rag. Then with considerable misgivings he did as he was bidden and held up his foot.
"Ah," said Dom Clemente dryly, "a thorn did that. The wound a thorn makes seems to keep curiously fresh. Well, you can put on the rag again."
Pacheco did it as hastily as he could while he wondered with a growing uneasiness what the man who regarded him with a little sardonic smile would ask him next. Dom Clemente, however, made him a sign to get up.
"One would recommend you to be more careful," he said. "You will have reason to regret it if the next time I have an errand for you you have a—thorn—in your foot."
Pacheco limped away with sincere relief, and Dom Clemente who sat still contemplatively smoked a cigar. While he did it he once more decided that it is now and then advisable to content oneself with simply looking on, and it was characteristic of him that when he next met Benicia he asked her no questions.
CHAPTER XX
DESMOND GOES ASHORE
It was a thick black night when Desmond brought the Palestrina into the Bahia, steaming at half-speed with the big smooth swell heaving in vast undulations behind her. The blinding deluge which had delayed him for half an hour had just ceased, and at every roll boat and deckhouse shook off streams of lukewarm water. A dripping man stood strapped outside the bridge swinging the heavy lead, and his sing-song cry which rose at regular intervals broke through the throb of slowly turning engines. A yard or two away from him Desmond leaned upon the rails peering into the darkness athwart which there ran a dim black line of bluff. A filmy haze that glimmered faintly white leapt up between him and it, and the stagnant air was filled with a great, deep-toned rumbling. It rolled along the half-seen bluff like the muttering of distant thunder, for, though the Bahia was partly sheltered, the vast heave of the Southern Ocean was crumbling upon the hammered beach that night. It does so now and then when there is not a breath of wind.