While the men were busy with the ropes, Don Lazarillo's dark and bearded face rose through the main hatch. His eyes swept the horizon, as mine had, and then they settled upon me with a frown of disappointment. His complexion was unwholesome, as from a long night of sleeplessness and anxiety, not to mention the several passions which would contend within him when he reflected on the death of his friend, the complete and tragic failure of the expedition, the prospective loss of his schooner, and the certain loss of the money—doubtless a large sum—with which I was quite sure he had aided Don Christoval in the execution of his scheme to run away with an English heiress. He gave me a sullen bow, pointed with a shrug to the bare ocean, addressed Mariana, whose eyes watched him from the galley-door, and descended into the cabin; but as I happened to be standing close to the companion-way, I was able to observe that he paused, before entering the interior, to make sure that somebody was watching Miss Noble's berth.
He had finished his breakfast by the time I was ready for mine, and as I took my seat he got up and went on deck in silence, casting a single savage glance at the door of the lady's cabin as he walked to the companion-steps. I looked in upon her when I had breakfasted; there was no change in her attitude: her trance, if trance it were, was as profound as ever it had been.
However, as it turned out, Don Lazarillo was not to pass another night aboard La Casandra. And, indeed, seeing what waters we were now navigating, it would have been extraordinary, a thing beyond all average sea-faring experience, had hour after hour rolled by without bringing us a sight of a sail. I was eating some dinner, at half-past one o'clock, in the cabin, when Butler put his head into the skylight and called down:
"Mr. Portlack, there's a small vessel standing almost direct for us out of the south'ard and west'ard—bound in, apparently, for the Portugal coast. Shall we signal her?"
"Ay, certainly," cried I. "Heave the schooner to, and run the ensign aloft. I'll be with you presently."
In about ten minutes' time I finished my dinner, swallowed a bumper of the noble Burgundy which had been stowed aft for the consumption of the Spaniards, lighted one of the fine Havana cigars, of which there was a locker half full, and, exchanging a sentence with Trapp, whose turn it was to keep watch on Miss Noble, went on deck. Not above three miles distant, and heading, as it seemed, directly for us, was a square-rigged vessel, a little brig, as she subsequently proved. Her canvas glanced like satin in the sun as she rolled. She was coming leisurely along under all plain sail. There was a color blowing at her main royalmast head, where alone it would have been visible to us, and on seeing it through a glass I made it out to be the Portuguese ensign.
Don Lazarillo was on deck, swathed in his long Spanish cloak, and wearing on his head a large Andalusian hat. He looked like a bandit in an opera. Mariana, whose head was adorned by a long blue cap, shaped like the night-caps men used to sleep in when I was a boy, watched the approaching craft from his favorite skulking-hole, the caboose door.
"She veel do, I hope!" cried Don Lazarillo, on catching sight of me, motioning toward the brig with a theatrical gesture.