“I do not know,” said Garcia Fernandez to Diego, “whether or not you have anything to tell, and of course I appreciate your unwillingness to seem a spy on your fellow-sailors; but this is a matter that concerns your life and my life and the lives of all of us. Bethink you, Diego, that what has been done once may be done again, and the more readily that it goes unpunished and undetected this time; and the next time the end may be our deaths. In that case it will be your crime as much as that of the man who does the act. To refuse to divulge what you know is generous and brave, it may be; but it is the madness of generosity and bravery.”
Diego could not but be affected by the argument; but he had his side to present, too. He looked resentfully at his cousin and said:
“I put myself in my cousin Captain Martin Alonzo’s way yesterday to warn him, and he thrust me aside with a blow.”
“How was I to know what you had to say?” demanded Martin Alonzo.
“You might have heard me, at least. But no, you could not grant even that courtesy to my mother’s son. I did not come this mad voyage to please myself, and I like it not; but I would have done my duty, and will do it now if you will but let me.” Garcia Fernandez motioned him to hush, pointing to the gathering wrath on Martin Alonzo’s face; but Diego was in the full tide of his wrongs and was not to be hushed. “You have forced me to come, when I prayed you not; you have likened me publicly to a thief and a convict; you have struck me unreasonably; and you have been willing to put a felon’s shame on me. If your ship had gone to the bottom it would have been your own fault in putting such a fear on me that I could not tell my plain duty. So I say to you plainly, I know who cut the gear, and I will not tell you!”
There Diego stopped, and doggedly shut his lips, while Garcia Fernandez and Francisco Martin looked at each other in dismay.
Chapter VIII.
Perhaps if Diego had been better acquainted with his cousin than he was, he would not have dared to brave him, though the provocation had been twice what it was and his own indignation doubly hot. Garcia Fernandez and Francisco Martin knew the temper of the captain, and they trembled for the rash boy.