"Cristo del Grao!… My captain's going to die!…"
He wanted to run to the galley in search of cotton and bandages. He was something of a quack doctor and always kept things necessary for such cases.
Ulysses stopped him. He would accept his services, but he wished something more.
"I want to eat, Uncle Caragol," he said gayly. "I shall be content with whatever you have…. Fright has given me an appetite."
CHAPTER XI
"FAREWELL, I AM GOING TO DIE"
When Ferragut left Barcelona the wound in his shoulder was already nearly healed. The rotund negative given by the captain and his pilot to the questions of the Carabineers freed them from further annoyance. They "knew nothing,—had seen nothing." The captain received with feigned indifference the news that the dead body of a man had been found that very night,—a man who appeared to be a German, but without papers, without anything that assured his identification,—on a dock some distance from the berth occupied by the Mare Nostrum. The authorities had not considered it worth while to investigate further, classifying it as a simple struggle among refugees.
Provisioning the troops of the Orient obliged Ferragut, in the months following, to sail as part of a convoy. A cipher dispatch would sometimes summon him to Marseilles, at others to an Atlantic port,—Saint-Nazaire, Quiberon, or Brest.
Every few days ships of different class and nationality were arriving. There were those that displayed their aristocratic origin by the fine line of the prow, the slenderness of the smokestacks and the still white color of their upper decks: they were like the high-priced steeds that war had transformed into simple beasts of battle. Former mail-packets, swift racers of the waves, had descended to the humble service of transport boats. Others, black and dirty, with the pitchy plaster of hasty reparation and a consumptive smokestack on an enormous hull, plowed along, coughing smoke, spitting ashes, panting with the jangle of old iron. The flags of the Allies and those of the neutral navies waved on the different ships. Reuniting, they formed a convoy in the broad bay. There were fifteen or twenty steamers, sometimes thirty, which had to navigate together, adjusting their different speeds to a common pace. The cargo boats, merchant steamers that made only a few knots an hour, exacted a desperate slowness of the rest of the convoy.
The Mare Nostrum had to sail at half speed, making its captain very impatient with these monotonous and dangerous peregrinations, extending over weeks and weeks.