The Rector watched him contemptuously. No, he was not sorry he had gone out after all! It had been God's way of saving a good man from committing murder! In a few minutes he would perish with that traitor of a brother. As for Dolores, she might live! That would be the worst punishment for her! Was there a bigger fraud in the world than life? No—he knew what a cheat life was! Death, death was the only honest thing, the thing that keeps all its promises and never lies! Death and the treachery of the sea—two truths, the only two truths! For the sea lets a man rob her! She leads him on and on, till he loves her! And then, some fine day, crash! and it's over. And so on, from father to son, generation after generation!
Such thoughts passed in instantaneous, successive flashes through the Rector's mind, as though the imminence of death were whetting his dull intelligence.
But, as Tonet's head came up through the hatch again, Pascualo jumped to his feet on the rolling deck, and uttered an exclamation of surprise. His brother had something in his hands. The life-preserver—the gift of siñá Tona to the Mayflower—which the Rector had laid away below and thereafter quite forgotten!
Tonet did not quaver at the stare of execration his brother gave him. "What are you going to do with that?" the Rector shouted.
"Going overboard! Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost! Think I'm going to drown here like a rat in a trap? No, sir, I'm going to take a chance!"
"The devil you are! You die with me, right here, and even then I don't know that we'll be square!"
In that supreme crisis, Tonet became again the harbor rowdy of his early boyhood, the ragamuffin stranger to respect and consideration for other people. He smiled ferociously, cynically, back at his brother.
Pale with hatred, the two men faced each other.
"Pare! Pare!" Pascualet again called faintly, tugging weakly at the lash that held him to the deck.
The Rector remembered that the child was there. Lowering, silent, grim, he let go the tiller, drew his knife from his belt, and cut the sash about the little fellow's waist.