And the Rector talked on, expounding the sailor's philosophy of life he had learned offshore under tio Borrasca. But no one listened, except the "cat," who was on his first voyage, and stood clinging, palish-green with fright, to the mast, but with eyes and ears, nevertheless, for everything.

Night fell. The Garbosa was hanging on under a close-reefed sail, driving head foremost into the pitchy dark. The lanterns had not been lighted, for the risk of being seen was worse, almost, than the danger of a collision. About nine o'clock, the Rector gave a frantic pull at the rudder. A light had appeared in the mist, close by off the port bow. It was a boat beating down in the opposite direction. Pascualo could not make out the lines of the craft as she sped past; but he knew it was the cutter, which had tired of loafing off the Cabanal, and was boldly running for the Columbretas to catch the smugglers in their refuge before the storm cleared. For the first time since leaving the pool that afternoon, the Rector let go the tiller for a second. "This, for a pleasant night!" laughed he, making a coarse but expressive gesture of contempt towards his vanishing enemy.

At one o'clock another light came up ahead. Rosario! Rosario! That's the beacon on the Church! Square off the Cabanal! And just the time to make a landing! But would the folks at home be on hand?

The Rector headed inshore, but then his astonishing good humor gave way to a thoughtful mood. He knew what that coast was like. If he tried to lie to in that blow, it would be all over in two hours. They would smash up, either on the Breakwater or on the bars in front of Nazaret. To run offshore was out of the question. The Garbosa was getting loggier and loggier every moment. The water was already way up in the hold. She would break to pieces in the sea before morning. There was no other way out of it. Ashore she must go, and trust to luck! Driving as much before the breakers as before the gale, the vessel held straight on toward the beach still shrouded in gloom. Suddenly another light! And it flashed three times, and went out. Then, three times again! Tonet joined the Rector in a cry of joy. Tio Mariano was on watch ashore. It was the signal agreed upon. He had scratched three matches under cover of a shawl, which kept the light from being seen except from the sea.

It looked like madness, but the Rector had the reef cut out of the sail. The Garbosa spurted like a race-horse, showing her keel, as she lunged through the waves, now forward and now astern. The boom of the surf ahead could now be heard above the howl of the gale. Finally, from the top of a comber, the beach came into view, the black profiles of the houses standing out against the sky. Then a sharp, snapping, crunching crash! The boat stopped short, grinding and groaning as though her timbers were being torn asunder. The wind caught the sail and the mast went overboard. A huge breaker burst over the stern, washing the men off their feet, and loosening the bales from their fastenings. The Garbosa had struck bottom, but only a few yards from dry land. Out through the surf a swarm of dark figures streamed, splashing into the water and rushing at the boat. Men climbed up on board, and without saying a word to the Rector and his crew, who stood there still speechless from the shock, they began to pick up the bundles and pass them on from hand to hand.

"Tio, tio!" the Rector called, finally recovering his wits, and leaping into the water, which hardly passed his belt.

"Here I am," came the answer from the dark. "But shut up, for God's sake, and get to work!"

And it was a strange weird spectacle, indeed. Darkness, everywhere, and a sea bellowing in the gloom, the reeds and shore-grass bent low under the gale, the breakers tumbling in as though bent on swallowing up the land, while a legion of dark-skinned men, with their clothes off, tugged at great bales in the hold of the vessel that was rapidly going to pieces, or fished them out from the foaming waters and dragged them up on the beach, where they disappeared mysteriously, while, in the intervals between gusts of wind, the sound of creaking wagon wheels could be heard.

Tio Mariano was walking about from one point to another in his long-legged boots, calling off sharp, imperious orders, and flourishing a revolver in his hand. There was no danger from the revenue men. The guards had all been "greased," and were watching to give the alarm if their chief arrived. The gun was for those silent workmen handling the bales, a light-fingered crew, faithful disciples of the doctrine that to steal from a thief is a virtue. But none of them would sneak anything away in the confusion! By God, the first man who tried any tricks would get something!

By the time the Rector had recovered his composure after that nerve-racking day and that terrible landing through the surf, and after he had stopped nursing the bruises received from a fall as the vessel struck, the last wagon was driving off; and the long-shoremen had vanished silently in all directions, as though the beach had eaten them alive. Not a bundle had been lost. Even those caught in the hold of the Garbosa had been pried loose from the crushed timbers, now sunk deep in the sand. Tonet and the two sailors had salvaged the sail, and the few things of value left aboard, and were carrying their load off up the beach. The "cat," meanwhile, who had been washed overboard by the great wave that first swept the boat, had been revived.

"Oh, tio!" the Rector exclaimed, when at last he was alone with his uncle. "I can say that now, can't I! It was a tough job, but we pulled it off, didn't we? The Christ of the Grao stood by us fine! We'll figure up accounts by and by, eh? Now I'm going home to Dolores. And won't she be glad to see me!"

And the pair walked off toward the distant village with scarcely a glance at the poor vessel. The old Garbosa lay there grinding up and down, her nose in the sand, taking each breaker full over the stern, at each crash losing some shred of her entrails out into the night. And thus she died, like a worn-out horse, that labors on in the noblest of emprises without glory and without reward, and finally leaves its bones on the wayside to be picked white by buzzard and crow.



CHAPTER VII

THE NAMING OF THE BOAT

Some days later, tio Mariano handed Pascualo the tidy sum of twelve thousand reales, the captain's share in the proceeds of the venture. But money was the least of the Rector's earnings. He had established himself now solidly in his uncle's grace, for the old man, with very slight risk to his own hide, had cleaned up twice that amount. Besides, the moment the whole story had gone the rounds, Pascualo became the lion of the Valencian water-front. A stroke of genius, that break from the Columbretas in a full gale! The cutter put in there at the height of the storm—and that was no child's play either—but she had her trouble for her pains!

The Rector stood quite aghast at his own good fortune. Adding the profits on the "moonshine" to the pile of money that, dollar by dollar, he and Dolores had stowed away in the place they only knew, you got a figure with which any honest man could start "something." And this "something" must of course have to do with the sea; for Pascualo was not the man to sit around in an easy chair, like his uncle, and skin poor people on shore alive! Smuggling, meanwhile, as a regular thing, was out of the question. That's a thing a young fellow ought to do once, to get his hand in; just as he ought to gamble—for once—since fortune is likely to favor the beginner. But it doesn't pay to flout the devil, in the long run. For a man like the Rector, fishing was the only certain trade, but in his own boat, with nothing lost to outfitters, who sit quietly at home and skim the cream of every catch.

There were many sleepless nights for the sturdy sailor, who kept rolling over and over between the sheets and waking Dolores up to get her opinion on each new idea. At last he made up his mind. His capital must go into a boat, not an ordinary boat, you understand, but the very best, if that were possible, of all the craft that ever set sail from the beach in front of the ox-barn there. His day had come at last, rediel! No more deck-hand business for him, and no more of this going halves. He would own a vessel, and the pole he would plant in front of the house, to carry the nets when drying, would be the tallest in the neighborhood!

And that hull on the ways there, ladies and gentlemen, belongs to the Rector from the Cabanal! His wife, Dolores the beautiful, Dolores the charming, will still have a stall in the Fishmarket, for all her wealth; but she will be selling her own fish soon, her own, I'll have you know. And as the women on their way to the Pescaderia now walked along the Gas House drain past the boat yard, with envious eyes they noticed the Rector always hanging around there chewing the end of a cigar, and supervising the carpenters as they sawed and hammered and planed away at the long yellow pitchy brand-new timbers, some of them straight, and strong, and thick, others of them light and curving—the keel, the ribs, the sheathing, of the projected boat! Now, not too fast, boys, not too fast! The Rector is taking his time at this job as at everything else. Go slow and then you'll be sure. No mistakes allowed! There's no hurry! The main thing is to see that this boat is the very best along the shore!

While Pascualo was putting body and soul into his new enterprise, Tonet, with his share in the booty—the Rector had done his best to make it as large as could be—was enjoying one of his seasons of prosperity. In the tumble-down shack where he lived with Rosario to the tune of quarrels, swear-words and cudgelings, not the slightest trace of abundance entered after the lucky trip "across the way." The poor woman was as usual up at sunrise to carry her baskets of fish to Valencia or even to Torrente or Betera, at times—always on foot—to save the price of a wagon. And when the weather was not right for fishing, she spent her days in her hovel, in company with her poverty and her despair. But Tonet, her Tonet, was handsomer than ever, in a new suit of clothes, with money in his pockets all the time, and a regular seat in the cafe, except when he was away, with some of the boys, at Valencia, going the rounds of the gambling joints, or spending gay nights in the Fishmarket section. Nevertheless, whenever he saw his uncle, and not to allow any of his claims on that worthy gentleman's pull to lapse, he would bring up the subject of the job on the harbor survey; for, chasing that position was his one serious occupation in times when he was out of money.

The fleeting prosperity that the African venture brought took him back to the joyous days of his marriage. With that happy virtue he had of taking no thought for the morrow, and with all that cynical gayety which endeared him so to women, he was not worried about what would happen when the wind-fall his brother had brought him should be exhausted. For that matter, his companions in roistering sometimes paid, and he had an occasional run of luck at cards. He would come home late at night to go to bed, scowling and cursing between his teeth. But woe to Rosario if she ventured any protest. For periods of two or three days, at times, he would not be seen there at all. Not so, however, in his brother's house. There he went frequently, loafing about the kitchen with Dolores, if the Rector was not at home, listening with bowed head and resigned humility, to the lectures she gave him on his scandalous conduct. When Pascualo happened in on one of these dressing-downs, he always seconded loyally the sound preaching of his wife. Yes, sir, Dolores was cross like that, because she was really fond of him! As a respectable woman, she couldn't afford to have a brother-in-law tearing around all the time and being the talk of the town. And the fat good-natured sailor's eyes would fill with tears, ira de dios, at what his Dolores was saying, a real woman, by God, as kind as a mother to that fool of a boy!

As his funds got lower, Tonet's attendance on his brother's household was still more assiduous. He was turning the motherly advice he got there to good account. And to avoid any chance of gossip, he showed himself day after day with the Rector up at the boat-yard, watching the progress of the big frame which was now receiving its planking and was gradually taking shape under the persistent efforts of hammer, ax and saw.

And summer was coming on. The stretch of seashore between the Gas House drain and the harbor, so solitary and deserted at other seasons of the year, was busily returning to life. The heat was beginning to drive the whole city to the water's side, where a veritable town of movable houses, like the temporary encampment of an army, was growing up. In a measured line along the sands ran the shacks of the vacationers, cheap structures with walls of painted canvas and roofs of cane, front doors labeled with fantastic names, and, to distinguish one camp from so many others like it, flag-staffs on the gables with banners of all colors, and above the flags, queer weathervanes—boats, dragons, dolls, gew-gaws of every shape and form. In a second line, farther from the shore, and speculating on the appetite that salt air awakens in dyspeptics, came the more pretentious and the more permanent structures of the restaurants and eating-places, with stairways and verandas, facades of ornate but inexpensive stucco, masking the frailty of such pomp under ostentatious names: The Paris Hotel and Restaurant, The Miramar, The Fonda del Buen Gusto; and between these pedants of summer-time gastronomy, the lunch-rooms of the natives, huts with roofs of matting, rickety tables with wine jugs in the center, and outdoor kitchens, dispensing shell-fish with vinegar dressing from Saint John's day till mid-September, under signs of delightfully capricious spelling: Salvaor and Neleta, wines, bears and likers.

Along the roads through this mushroom city, that vanished like a fog with the first gales of autumn, street and steam cars dashed full speed, whistling to scare you before they crushed you flat; or tartanas creaked along, their red curtains flapping like banners of pure joy; or crowds of people pressed their way, with the murmur of many, many voices. It was the humming of a bee-hive, varied with the calling of vendors, the thrumming of guitars, the nasal screaming of accordions, the clack-clack of castanets, the wailing of hand organs, all the kinds of noise that men with smoothed hair and soft white shirts can dance to, after internal baths with anything but water and preparatory to the return to town for a slashing or boxing fray with the first innocent policeman they come across.

The people of the sea, beyond the drain, watched the gathering of this annual invasion with interested eyes, but without taking part in all its jollity. Let them enjoy themselves—if they were willing to pay for it! All that merry-making was the source of the Cabanal's pin-money, for the other seasons of the year.

On the first of August the Rector's boat was, you might say, done. And what a beauty she was, come now, tell the truth and don't be envious! The proud owner spoke of his creation much as a grand-daddy sizes up a new baby in his son's family. "The timber? Well, did you ever see solider beams than hers! And look at the finish on that mast! Not a cross grain to it from deck to point! A bit thick amidships! But I wanted her like that—handles rough water better. But just take a peep at that bow of hers! Sharp enough to cut paper with! Black along the scuppers, but with a shine like the patent leather shoe of a Grandee of Spain; and the body of her, white, but smooth as an eel, and just as fast, by God, in the water!" The rigging, the fishing gear and other trappings, were not yet aboard. But the best tackle makers along shore were at work on them, and by the fifteenth, the whole trousseau would be ready, and, pretty as a bride on the way to church, would she take the water! All this and more, the Rector was saying one evening to the circle of neighbors who, as usual, were sitting around his door.

He had invited his mother and his sister Roseta to supper that night. Dolores was at his side. Some distance away, with his rope-seated chair tilted back against an olive tree, and looking up at the moon through the branches in the dreamy pose of a chromo troubadour, sat Tonet, picking at the strings of a mandolin. On the walk in front some fish were frying on a little earthen stove. A number of children, Pascualet among them, were chasing a dog about in the mud of the gutters. Groups were sitting in front of the other houses along the road, to get full benefit of the faint breeze that was blowing off the sea. Redeu! How people must have been stewing in Valencia that night!

Sina Tona was getting very old. She had "taken her jump," as she put it. From comely buxomness she had passed abruptly into old age, and the raw bluish light of the moon made evident that the hair on her head had thinned, leaving a scant network of taut gray locks over her sunburned scalp. The wrinkles now sank deep into her emaciated face while her cheeks hung loose and baggy, and her black eyes, once the talk of the whole shore, peered sad and faded from the folds of skin that drooped about them. Old long before her time, and from heartbreak, mostly, the spite and the worry that men had given her! And this she said with a nod in Tonet's direction, but with her thoughts, almost certainly, on the guardsman who had long before betrayed her. Besides, times had been getting harder and harder! What the tavern now brought in was nothing, practically. Roseta had had to go to work in the tobacco factory in town; and every morning, with her lunch-box on her arm, she went off along the highway to Valencia, joining the bands of pretty, bold-faced girls who marched with tapping heels and swishing skirts to sneeze all day in the snuff-laden air of the Old Customs House. And what a girl Roseta had grown to be! Roseta was just the name for her! When her mother, sometimes, looked at her out of the corners of her eyes, she seemed to see in her all the florid exuberance of the handsome sinor Martines.

Even now, while complaining that her daughter would have to take the long walk on winter mornings, she could not help feasting her eyes on that head of tangled golden hair out there under the olive tree, those dreamy sea-green eyes, that white skin that neither sun nor wind could darken, flecked now by the shadows of the branches which the moon outlined in arabesques of light and shade on the girl's face. Roseta, with her air of a maiden who knows all there is to know, kept looking from Dolores to Tonet and from Tonet to Dolores. At the fulsome praises that Pascualo kept showering upon his brother—for drifting away from the waster's life he had been leading to spend more and more of his time in that house where he found a peaceful, homelike kindliness he had never known in his own—the young half-sister smiled sarcastically. Oh, these men, these men! Just as she and mama had always said! Either scamps like Tonet, or puddingheads, like the Rector. Men! She would have none of them! And the Cabanal could never make out why she refused every boy who proposed to her! She would never have one of the wretched animals kicking around between her feet. She had taken well to heart all the curses she had heard her mother heap on men in her bitterest moments of despair down there in the loneliness and gloom of the tavern-boat.

No one had spoken for some time. The fish continued sizzling in the frying-pan. Tonet was still picking disconnected chords from his mandolin. The band of youngsters playing in the street were staring up at the moon as though they had never seen it before, singing in cadenced monotone with silvery little voices:

La lluna, la pruna Vestida de dol ...

"Eh, will you brats shut up!" Tonet protested, claiming that he had a headache. "You come and make us!" came the answering challenge:

Sa mare la crida; Son pare no vol ...

And the dog joined in this children's hymn of adoration to Diana's glory, with barks that filled the neighborhood with chills.

The Rector could think of nothing but the boat. Everything had been fixed for the fifteenth, even the matter of the curate, who would go and give her a dash of holy water in the middle of the afternoon. Everything, except one thing, futro! And that had occurred to him that very moment! Of course! She never had been named ...! Well, what shall we call her? This unexpected and exciting problem set the whole group a-talking. Even Tonet laid his mandolin down on the ground and seemed to be meditating deeply. He, at any rate, came out with the first suggestion: "Spit-Fire"! Now, what do you say to that!

The Rector's corpulent agreeableness saw nothing wrong with that name. Spit-Fire! What pride it would be for him to command a boat that, faithful to such a christening, would go saucily crashing through the storms with the untamed arrogance of a Portuguese! It was the women who objected. Spit-Fire! Nonsense! Who ever heard of a fish-boat spitting fire! That would make her the joke of all the Cabanal. No, sina Tona had the right idea—"Fleet-Foot," the name of old Pascualo's boat, the one he had died in, and that, later on, had been the home of all the family. But now it was the men's turn to shout something down. No, that would bring bad luck, as the fate of Fleet-Foot herself had shown. Dolores had a good one. Why not "Rose of the Sea" ... a pretty name ... as pretty as she was, and in fine taste.... But the Rector observed that that name was on a boat already.... Too bad, too.... It was a beauty! Roseta, who had pouted in disdain at every suggestion thus far, finally came out with her own proposal. She had thought of it at home, the evening before, on looking at a picture that came in a package of tobacco from Gibraltar. She thought the name looked so pretty! It was printed in colors around the trademark on the box—a girl in dancing costume, with roses red as tomatoes on the little white skirt and a bunch of flowers in her hand, as bright and stiff as radishes! Flor de mayo! The boat should be called "Mayflower!"

Recristo! The Rector rubbed his hands in glee. Of course, just the thing, just the thing! Think a moment! "Flor de mayo"—the famous brand of Gibraltar! Well, the boat was built of tobacco, you might say. Most of the money in her had come from smuggling those very rolls that showed the gay dancer in the bright colors! Roseta was right! Flor de mayo! Flor de mayo!

The name pleased everybody, awakening in those sluggish imaginations a thrill of poetry and romance. They found something mysterious and attractive in the name, without suspecting the charm attached to it by that historic boat which carried the Puritans to the new world and marked the birth of the great republic of the West!... The Rector could not contain his joy. Roseta had the brains for you! Let's have dinner on that, ladies and gentlemen! And we'll have a real toast afterward ... to Flor de mayo!

The frying-pan was lifted from the stove and carried into the house, and the whole family rose to follow—significant happenings that did not escape the watchful eyes of little Pascualet. He deserted his orpheon of tiny choristers. The monotone of la lluna la pruna came to an end, and peace settled over the moon-lit country-side.

It was not long before the whole Cabanal, with that gift for rapid perception of important things that little places have, was aware that the Rector's new boat was to be christened Flor de mayo. And when, the evening before the blessing of the vessel, she was dragged down to the water's edge in front of the casa del bous, the beautiful mysterious name could be read on the inside of her stern sheets, painted in letters of fetching blue.

The next afternoon, the cabin section of the Cabanal was in festive mood. Occasions like that were few indeed! Standing god-father in the baptismal rites was "Senor Mariano el Callao," no less a stingy old fat-purse, granted, but with enough heart in him to shell out a penny or two for a nephew like that on a day like that. Sweets a-plenty were to be passed around on the shore, with barrels of drinks. Barrels! Besides, that Rector boy knew how to do things well. He took the crew he had engaged for the first trip and went off to the church to escort don Santiago, the curate, to the beach. The priest welcomed him with one of those smiles he kept for his very best parishioners only. "What! Ready so soon? Well, son, won't you just run around and tell the sacristan to get the water and the hyssop ready! I'll just get into my cassock, and be with you in a jiffy...." "Not quite so fast, don Santiago!" observed the Rector. "Not quite so fast! You ought to see this is not an occasion for any cassock business, or stuff like that. Your cope, father, your cope, and the best you've got, see? You don't launch a boat like this every other day. Never mind about the money! I'll pay what's right!" The good priest smiled. "Very well ... the cope isn't just the thing, but cope it is, if you say so.... We're ready to accommodate good members of our flock, who know how to appreciate favors."

And they started back from the rectory, the sacristan in front with the hyssop and the holy vessel; then the curate surrounded by his guard of honor, the captain and his men. In one hand don Santiago was carrying his book of prayers, in the other the train of his old but sumptuous cope, to keep it out of the mud. The handsome robe was of a white somewhat yellowed with age; and the heavy gold borders had tarnished green, while the padding over the lining peeped through in places where the outer cloth had been worn thin.

Children came up in droves to press their sniffling noses on the good priest's hand, which at every step, almost, had to let the train fall into the muck. Women greeted smilingly from the sidewalks. The dear old pae capella! What a good-natured soul—never too harsh on penances, but able to see through you, just the same, if you tried to fool him. Don Santiago had the secret of adapting himself to the weaknesses of his flock. Many a time he would stop in the street to extend his blessings over the fish baskets of some woman of the market, or touch his fingers miraculously to a pair of short scales to charm it against any danger lest the inspectors of Valencia detect its fraudulent weights!

When the procession reached the shore, the bells began to ring, mingling their garrulous ding-dong in the gentle crunching of the surf. Late comers could be seen running along the sands to arrive in time for everything. There, on a stretch of beach that was quite free of boats, the Mayflower rose from the middle of a swarming crowd, her bright varnished sides gleaming white in the sunlight, her rakish mast, gracefully tilted forward, standing out against the blue, its peak adorned with the baptismal insignia of a new boat, sheaves of grass and bunches of cloth flowers, that would hang up there till the storm winds finally wrenched them loose.

The Rector and his party elbowed their way through the crowd pressing around the boat. At the stern were the two sponsors—sina Tona, godmother, in a new shawl and skirt; and "Senor" Mariano, god-father, in his tall hat and with his cane, in the very get-up that he wore at his talks with the Governor in town! The whole family offered a spectacle of gay and showy magnificence. Dolores had her pink dress on, and a new kerchief of flaming colors; while her fingers gleamed with every ring she owned. Tonet was strutting about on deck in his new suit, his shining silk cap pulled down over one ear, twirling his mustache in immense satisfaction that his conspicuous position enabled so many pretty girls to sate their eyes on him. On the ground, with Roseta, was his Rosario in the least shabby of her gowns, and sure not to make trouble with Dolores on such a solemn day. The Rector, for his part, had turned Englishman over night. He was sporting a blue woolsey suit that a friend of his, an engineer on a steamer, had brought on from Glasgow. On his vest shone a watch chain as big as one of the stays on his boat—and that was the real surprise he had saved for the celebration. He was sweating like a stoker in that garment that might have done very well in winter. He had taken upon himself the task of keeping order, shoving people back when they edged up too close to the priest and the baptismal party. "The idea, gentlemen.... That talking, there! Sh-h-h. This ceremony is not a thing to laugh about. The fun, later on ...!" And he set a good example by taking off his cap and putting on a long face, as the chaplain, sweating just as much under that stifling cope, was fumbling through his book to find the prayer beginning Propitiare Domini supplicationibus nostris et benedic navem istam.... Sina Tona and tio Mariano on either side of the curate stood with eyes nailed to the ground. The sacristan watched his master like a cat after a mouse, ready to say amen on the slightest pretext. The multitude with heads bare was hushed and still, as though something extraordinary were about to happen.

Don Santiago knew his public. He read the simple prayer slowly and solemnly, making each syllable stand out, and introducing impressive pauses to take full advantage of the general silence. The Rector, quite beside himself with emotion and not knowing what he was doing, nodded assent to every word, as though taking those Latin phrases that were falling on his Mayflower seriously to heart. What he really caught was all that about Arcam Noe ambulantem in diluvio; and he straightened up to his full height in pride, at the vague feeling that his boat was being likened to that ancient craft, the most famous in Christian annals! So he was a real comrade now of that wicked old patriarch who invented wine and became the first and best sailor of his time, on earth! Sina Tona could stand the strain no longer. She crammed her handkerchief into both eyes to keep the tears from bursting out. When the prayer was over, the curate reached for the hyssop: Asperges ... and he sprinkled a rain of water upon the boat's stern, and the spray dripped down in shining drops over the painted sides. Amen, said the sacristan; and don Santiago, with the Rector in front of him to clear the way, and followed by the sacristan, amening every word, started round the boat, showering Latin and holy water at every step.

Pascualo could not understand that the ceremonies were over. "See here, don Santiago! There's the rigging still to do, and the deck, and then down in the hold! There's a good fellow! It won't take you long ... and I'll do what's right, you know!" And the curate, smiling at the earnestness of the young man's plea, went up, finally, to the ladder that had been set up against the Mayflower's bilge, and began the ascent, catching the floundering cope underneath his feet on every rung. And the vestment of white and gold caught the afternoon sun and gleamed afar like the shell of a bright climbing scarab. But when he had blessed everything to the Rector's full content, he withdrew with his assistant, and the throng rushed for the boat like an army storming a wall.

They would give her the right send-off, that crowd of bedraggled loud-talking ragamuffins, the scrapings from the whole beach, already besieging the sponsors with their petulant whining: "Our candy now, and the almonds, the almonds!" "Senor" Mariano's face was beaming omnipotent over the vessel's side. "Candy, eh! It's candy you want!" He well knew what all the good things he had brought to eat had cost—one whole onza—gold—to keep on good terms with nephew! And he bent over, and sunk his hands into the baskets between his legs. "Well, candy it is!" And he began to rain nuts and cinnamon lozenges, as hard as bullets, upon the heads of the clamoring mob, and the young ones, girls and boys, began to scramble on the sand, fighting for the goodies, dirty underskirts squirming about among trousers with huge rents that showed the bare scaly skins of the beach-combers underneath.

Tonet was uncorking bottles of gin and pointing them out to special friends with lavish and condescending urgency as if he were doing the honors himself. Liquor began to pass around by the jugful. Everybody was drinking—the beach guards, their guns on their shoulders, retired sea-captains from the village, men from other boats—barefoot, mostly, these, and dressed in yellow baize, like clowns—and tiny "cats," with knives of grotesque proportions thrust crosswise into the sashes about their ragged waists.

The real carousal was going on up on deck. The planking of the Mayflower was beginning to clack like the polished floor of a ball-room, and the rich smell of a tavern was filling the atmosphere about the boat. Dolores, who could resist the call of all that gayety no longer, started to climb the ladder, kicking out at every rung at the crowd of pestering "cats" who gathered round for one look at the ankles of the pretty girl as she went higher. The Rector's wife knew that her real element was up there where there was so much man around, where her charms would be certain of voracious admiration as she stamped about on boards that belonged to her—every inch of them—and where the women down below, especially Rosario—she would be green with envy—could get a good look at her success.

Pascualo, meanwhile, was with his mother. On that solemn occasion, which meant so much to him, which he had looked forward to for so long, he felt a strange return of his affection for the poor old woman. He forgot his beautiful wife and even Pascualet—the rogue was as busy as could be with the cinnamon balls, up on deck—to give all his attention to sina Tona.

"A full-fledged master, outfitter, owner of a boat—my own boat!" And he kissed and hugged the old mother who was weeping streams from her puffy eyes. Tona's thoughts indeed were running back over long, long years of widowhood and loneliness and ostracism and over the memory of that mad adventure with the guardsman, to a similar christening she had witnessed in her youth. Tio Pascualo rose before her memory, strong, young, handsome, as she had known him in the days of their courtship. And his departure from life became as bitterly sorrowful as if he had vanished but the day before. "My boy, my boy—fill meu, fill meu!" she sobbed, throwing her arms about the sturdy neck of the Rector, who at that moment seemed to be the resurrection of his father's very self.

And Pascualo, in truth, was the honor of the family, the boy whose hard work had redeemed her lost station, her lost importance, in that community. Her tears now were not of sorrow only but of remorse. She had never loved the boy enough, not half so much as he deserved. Her affection was overflowing now—she must make up for all the past. Then, she was afraid, yes, sir, afraid, that her Pascualet, her poor little Rector, would go the way his father went; and as the words hung tremulously upon her lips, she looked off toward the tavern-boat, just visible from the Mayflower's splendid hull, in which that martyr of the sea had met his frightful end.

What a contrast between the Mayflower, so new, and strong, and spick, and span, and that rotting hulk which, for lack of custom now, was daily growing blacker and more worm-eaten! The old woman seemed to vision in the future a day when the Mayflower might drift ashore, cracked and water-logged, just as old Fleet-Foot had come home with her husband's corpse in her hold. No, she could not be happy. All that roistering and carousing was a sin. It was making fun of the sea, that hypocrite with the smiling face out there, that purring cat that was meek enough for the moment, but that would show her claws when once the Mayflower was in her power. Her boy! What a strong handsome boy—and she loved him as much as though he had just come back from a long voyage! But old Pascualo had been just as strong and handsome. And he made fun of the sea too! Now, she knew it, she was sure of it! The sea had a grudge against her family, and would swallow the new boat as it had wrecked the old.

"Bosh, mama, bosh! Recristo, the old lady will never get her hands on me! But anyhow, why go crying on a glad day like this? You're just getting religion, like most of the old ladies—your conscience is at you for having forgotten papa for so long, perhaps. But you can make that right by lighting a good fat candle to the old sailor, in case his soul is still in Purgatory. Come now, mama, brace up. No more prophesying! The sea is a good fine lover of mine. I won't listen to any gossip about her! She gets riled at times, but after all she gives poor folks like us a living. Here, Tonet! Give us a drink, a good big swig! Cheer the place up a bit. Let's give the Mayflower a good old-fashioned send-off."

He took the beaker that was handed him and drank a deep draught. But his mother went on weeping, her eyes still gazing at the tavern-boat down the shore. The Rector showed some signs of irritation. "Still bawling, eh! And this is the time to talk of funerals! See, ma, you ought to have made me a bishop, then there'd be no cause for whining from the women folks. Honest, and work hard, say I, and trust to luck! That's the sailor's creed! The sea? The sea gives us everything. It raises us when we are little. And it feeds us when we're grown up. We're always asking something of the sea! Well, we have to take a storm now and then, along with the big runs. Besides, somebody's got to risk his skin, if folks are going to have fish to eat. That somebody is me. Out to sea I go, as I've always gone. And that's the end of that! And now, enough of this whimpering business, what do you say, ma? Here's to Flor de Mayo! Here's to 'Mayflower.' Cristo! another mug, boys, on me, on me! Drink her down, drink her down, till every mother's son of you is drunk. And I'll feel insulted if they don't come down and get you to-night because you can't walk home, and find you all rooting in the sand here like so many grunting hogs!"



CHAPTER VIII

THE MAYFLOWER PUTS TO SEA

Pascualo was on his way home from an afternoon in Valencia; but on reaching the Glorieta, he stopped in front of the Old Customs House.

It was six o'clock. The sun was tinting the enormous front of the building an orange gold, softening the colors of the greenish black smudge that the rain had left on the mansard windows. The statue of Charles II seemed to be melting into the mellow bluish transparency of the light-filled atmosphere. Through the gratings drifted the hum of a busy hive—voices calling, songs coming from a distance, the metallic click of scissors as the workers picked them up or let them fall.

Out through the big entrance the girls from the nearest floors were beginning to pour in animate throng—a horde of Indian shawls, a medley of strong arms with sleeves rolled above the elbow, an army of lunch-boxes slung over shoulders, a pitter-patter of feet, hopping in short quick steps like sparrows, a hub-bub of good-nights, of greetings, of parting gibes. The promenade for the guards, where a few drinking fountains were the only obstructions, was one seething mass of feminine youth.

The Rector, attracted by that curious riot of tobacco-girls, had paused on the sidewalk across the street, among the newspaper stands. A strange fascination it had for him, that moving mass of white handkerchiefs drawn tightly over pretty foreheads! What a bedlam! A regiment of females in mutiny! A nunnery gone mad! A meteor-shower of black eyes, that stared at a man boldly, immodestly, stripping the clothes off one, it seemed, with mocking effrontery!

And who was this coming in his direction? Roseta had spied him, and deserting a party of girls, was tripping over toward him. Her companions were to wait for friends from another floor, and they might be some minutes in starting. Was he going home? All right! They would go together! Roseta hated just standing around!

They took the Grao road, Pascualo moving his sea-legs frantically to keep up with that devil of a girl who never walked but she ran, though with an attractive swaying of her body which made her skirt go up and down like the marking buoy in a yacht race. Shouldn't he carry her lunch-box for her? Thanks! She was used to having it on her arm. Didn't think she could walk so fast without it!

By the time they were at the Sea Bridge, the captain was on the subject of his boat, as usual. That Mayflower of his could even make him forget he had a Dolores and a Pascualet! The next morning the bou-fishing began, and all the vessels would go out. "But she's queen of the lot! We hitched the oxen on to her yesterday, and now she's in the water, anchored with the other boats in the harbor. But there's no mistaking her, girl! She strikes your eye like a senorita in the middle of a bunch of beach-trailers!" He had been in town to get a few odds and ends still lacking to his equipment. Now he had a dollar to bet that not one of the rich men in the Cabanal, who sat around at home and got the best of every load of fish without lifting a finger, could show a craft half the witch the Mayflower was ... not half.

But the end which comes to everything in this world came also to the store of nice things the Rector had to say, in his enthusiasm, about his boat. By the time the pair had reached the bakery of Figuetes, Pascualo had lapsed into his normal taciturnity, and Roseta held the floor, dealing with the forewomen in the tobacco factory in terms that such cattle deserved.

"Work the life out of you, they do! It was all I could do to keep myself from waiting outside and pulling the topknot of that wench as she came out! I don't mind about myself so much. Mama and me can get along on nothing almost. But it's different with others of us. Why, some of those girls have to sweat like niggers, to feed some loafer of a husband, and a houseful of brats that wait at the door at night with their mouths wide open to swallow half the bread in town! What I don't see is how, in conditions like that, there's a woman left in the world who can laugh. For instance ..." And the golden-haired Diana, so insensible to the allurements of men, but reared withal among the filthy-mouthed ragamuffins of the seashore, struck an air of stern and serious modesty, and recounted in words of disconcerting directness, but with a rippling sweetness of tone that seemed to wipe the foulness of such language from her cheery lips, the story of a shopmate of hers at home with a broken arm, after a beating from her husband, who had caught her in flagrant wrong-doing with a friend of his! "I wouldn't call her much of a woman, I wouldn't!" and the virtuous Roseta pouted the pout of a virgin who knows all there is to know. "What a disgrace! And she had four children—four!"

The Rector smiled a ferocious smile. "So she got out of it with a broken arm, did she! I'd have broken her neck, I would! No half-way business with these women that don't know what belongs to their husband and what belongs to the other fellow! Imagine living with a thing like that! Thank God, I didn't draw one of that kind. I've got a good wife and a happy home!" "Yes, you can thank God, all right," Roseta assented with one of her smiles of compassionate contempt. But the Rector was not spry of wit. And the finer shadings of irony escaped him.

But as the simple-minded sailor walked along, he grew more and more excited at the outrageous conduct of that woman he didn't know and at the misfortune of that husband whose name he had never heard. "You know, a rotten business like that gets under my skin, it does. Here's an honest man breaking his back from morning till night to feed his woman and his boys and his girls, and comes home from the shop and finds my lady flouncing around with Mr. 'Friend'! God, girl! I'd cut the wench's throat, I would—if I swung for it! If you ask me, I say—well, whose fault is it? The women! Yes, the women! What was a woman ever put on this earth for, except to damn a man's soul! Dios! I never saw but two decent women, anyhow. One is Dolores, and the other is you!" For the Rector, when he talked so extensively, was inclined to go to extremes, and he felt this time that his sweeping denunciation needed that much qualification.

Though much good the concession did him! For his sister was now on ground where, from the long tirades of Sina Tona, she could be counted quite expert. She talked passionately, with a tinge of irritation in her sweet vibrant voice. "Women, eh! Women! Not a bit of it! It's the men, I say, and I know what I'm talking about. Among the pigs in this world, the prize hog is the man! See trouble anywhere? Look and you'll find a man at the bottom of it. Mama says so, too. There are two kinds of men in this world—scamps and puddingheads! If a woman goes wrong, it's the man that's to blame. If she's not married they are all after her to get what they want ... and maybe I don't know that! If I was the fool some men take me for, God knows the fix I'd be in to-day! And if you are married, well, it's worse, almost—for the scamps try to get you into trouble, and the puddingheads haven't sense enough to keep their wives where they belong. Look at Tonet, for instance! Wouldn't Rosario be serving him right if she went on the street, even, to get square with him for all he does! And then, well, no! Stop at Tonet! We don't need to give other examples! But the whole Cabanal knows about husbands that are themselves to blame if their wives aren't all they ought to be!"

And the girl leered at the Rector so unguardedly, in saying this, that Pascualo, in spite of his corpulent obtuseness, caught the glimmer of an allusion and studied her face enquiringly. But his immense faith, at bottom, in people and in things stood him in good stead against any dangerous inference. And he protested, mildly, at her exaggeration. Bosh! People in the Cabanal made him sick! They were always talking about somebody, to pass the time. If you listened to what people said, there wasn't a decent woman in town, nor a husband that wasn't the joke of the beach. But that's only a way they had of amusing themselves. The Cabanal had no manners, as don Santiago, the curate, said so well! "Now, take me, for instance. I've got the best, sweetest wife in the world, and everybody knows it! Well, does that keep those fools from blabbing about her? And who's the man? Tonet, may it please the court! Tonet, of all men! The people in the Cabanal are donkeys, idiots, rotters, that's all! Tonet, God save us! Why, Tonet ... he worships Dolores, like a mother.... But no, my house has simply got to be a brothel, for those chatter-boxes.... Tonet! God!" And the Rector laughed one of those hearty laughs of pitying superiority at the stupidity of people, the kind of laugh the Spanish peasant gives when he hears some benighted ignoramus questioning the authenticity of the village Virgin's miracles.

Roseta stopped short in her tracks, sizing up the Rector with those dreamy sea-green eyes of hers. What did that laugh mean? Was Pascudo serious? Yes, without a doubt. As serious as a preacher! That puddinghead was proof-proof! And the certainty angered her. Instinctively, without reckoning the consequences of what she was doing, she came out with the charges that had been tickling her tongue for years! In short: two kinds of men, scamps and puddingheads! And a glance of hers stamped the second label upon her brother, as he, in fact, divined.

"So I'm the puddinghead, am I! Hah-hah!... Now see here, Roseta ... out with it! All you know! And no mincing of words, either, or you'll be sorry!"

They were half-way home now, near the roadside Cross. And they stopped a moment in front of it. The Rector's ruddy face had turned pale as death, and he kept biting nervously at his fingers, those blunt, bony, calloused fingers of a fisherman.

"Well, Roseta," he added, when she stood silent still. "Out with it!"

But the girl did not come out with it. She had caught a dangerous gleam in her brother's eye. She was afraid she had gone too far; and, a kindly soul at heart, she repented her imprudent innuendos. She had caused the pallor and the expression of fierce solemnity on that good-natured face!

"Oh, as for knowing, Pascualo, I don't know anything. It's only what people say. But they say lots of things. And if you want them to stop talking, I'd advise you to have Tonet around your house as little, as little, as possible!"

Pascualo had stooped over the watering-trough near the Cross, and covered the whole end of the pipe with his mouth, to let the stream run full into his stomach, as though to drown a conflagration that was burning in his insides. He straightened up and started on, the water dripping down over his chin, till he wiped it away with the back of a rough hand.

"I see. So that's all talk! Well, if they want to wait for me to be nasty to Tonet, they can wait till hell freezes over. Filthy, stupid, malicious chatter-boxes! That's what they are! So I must slam the door in the face of that poor boy, eh! Well, I won't! Just when he's settling down a bit, from the good influence Dolores has over him! And they're all jealous of her, that's what. Just plain jealous!" And the gesture with which he underlined the spiteful words seemed to include Roseta among the envious. "Well, it's my affair, and so long as I don't worry, they needn't. Let them talk their tongues off. That boy is what amounts to a son to me. Why, it seems only yesterday when I was carrying him around in my arms, like a nurse. And when he went to bed at night, I'd roll up in a ball almost, so's he could have plenty of room. And now I'm to kick him out of my house. No, you don't forget some things in a hurry. Oh, yes, when things go right and there's no trouble, you forget easy enough. You forget the fellows you used to drink with in the taverns. But we used to be hungry together, redeu, hungry; and you don't forget times like that. Poor Tonet! No! I'm going to stand by that boy till I get him on his feet and make a man of him, I am. What do they think!... That I'm an ox, probably, a plain damn fool! All right, but this damn fool has got a heart under his ribs, he has." And the Rector, filling with deeper and deeper emotion, rapped on that well-padded chest of his, and his thorax echoed like a drum.

For as much as a quarter of an hour the two of them walked on in silence, Roseta frightened at the possible outcome of their conversation; Pascualo, in a gloomy mood, stumbling along with lowered head and frowning darkly whenever he raised his eyes, clenching his fists as though in struggle with an evil thought that would not down. Thus they reached the Grao and were through it before either of them spoke.

"And anyhow, Roseta," said the Rector at last, from sheer necessity of giving some expression to the anguished meditations that were writhing within him, "and anyhow, it's just as well that it is mere talk. For if I should find some day, that it's more than that ... recristo, nobody really knows who I am! I'm afraid of myself, sometimes! I'm an easy-going sort of chap, and never go around looking for trouble. I even yield a point down on the beach, now and then, because I've a boy to look out for and have never cared to play the bully, or the tough. But there are two things in this world that I have, and that I call mine: my money, and my wife. Let no one dare lay a finger on either of them. On the way back from Algiers, with that load, I was afraid once the cutter was going to get us. And do you know what I had made up my mind to do? Back up against the mast there, with my knife out, and kill and kill and kill, till they cut me down on top of those bales of 'mayflower' that for me meant fortune. And then Dolores ... at times when I thought how nice she looked and what a good woman she was, something of the great lady about her—I don't know what—that makes her so wonderful, it occurred to me—why not say it right out?—that some fellow, some day, might try to get her away from me. Well, sir, I could have throttled her almost, at the mere idea of such a thing, and then gone out raving through the streets like a mad dog. I guess that's what I'm like, Roseta, a dog; so good-natured, so harmless, ordinarily, but able to clean the town up when he goes mad, so's they have to kill him. Well, that's the point! They'd better let me alone, and not go monkeying with my happiness, nor with what I've got together with my own hard work...."

There was a drawn expression on his face as he looked at Roseta after this tirade, a veritable oration for the phlegmatic Rector; and the poor girl felt as if she were being accused of the attempted theft of Dolores.

But Pascualo suddenly, with a gesture of disdain, seemed to come out of his abstraction; and it was evident he felt ashamed at having lost hold on his tongue so far, in a moment of baseless alarm. He had had enough of Roseta, however. And, in fact, they could separate there. "Remember me to mother!" he said, as he turned down to the beach, leaving his sister to go on alone along the road toward the tavern-boat. But it was late that night before the influence of that disquieting conversation was lifted from Pascualo's mind. Tonet was at home when he arrived, but did not seem at all embarrassed in his presence. All a lie, of course! One look at the boy was enough to show that! The Rector looked searchingly into his own heart, and could find no trace of suspicion there. Nothing to it, absolutely, absolutely, nothing! And when, the men of the crew dropped in to get their final orders for the next day, he had forgotten the matter completely.

He had hired a boat to work in team with the Mayflower, though, with dog's luck, he would some day be able to build another just like her! Among the men was an old sailor whom the Rector listened to with profoundest respect. Tio Batiste was the oldest tar in the whole Cabanal. Seventy years of sailoring were stuffed into that sun-dried crackling hide of his, whence they issued, smelling to heaven of strong tobacco, in the form of practical suggestions and maritime prophecy. Pascualo had taken him on, not so much for the help his aged arms could give, as for the exact knowledge he had of the coast thereabouts. From the Cabo de San Antonio to the Cabo de Canet, the gulf did not have a hole nor a shallow that tio Batiste did not know all about. Turn him into a smelt and toss him overboard, and he'd tell you where he was, the minute he got to the bottom! The top of the water might be a closed book to other people; but he could read, from the looks of it, just what there was underneath.

He would sit up forward on the boat, and describe the bumps on the bottom as though he were on a wagon roughing the road-ruts. With one glance he could tell whether your boat was over the kelp grounds, or over the mud-banks, called El Fanch, or over those mysterious submarine hillocks, called the Pedrusquets, where the fishermen were always in terror of losing their nets on the sharp crags that cut the seines to shreds. Between the Muralls de Confit, the Bareta de Casaret and the Roca de Espioca, lay deep tortuous gullies far down under the sea. Tio Batiste could drag a net through the winding channel there without catching on a single rock, and without scooping up a mass of kelp that would break your tackle through. A dark night of fog! Not a lighthouse visible! Thick gloom ten feet ahead! One taste of the mud on your net, and the old wizard would say where you were to a hundred yards. Only a salmon or a squid could have been the teachers of that wondrous learning! And tio Batiste knew many other useful things—that you should not cast your seine on Hallowe'en, for instance, unless you wanted to bring up a corpse; or that the man who carried the Cross of the Grao on Good Friday would never die at sea.

For that matter he had spent all his life on shipboard. By the time he was ten, he could show callouses under his arm-pits, from hauling at the lines. He had a dozen trips to Cuba to his credit—not the kind of trips youngsters brag about nowadays, because they've been across as waiters or barbers on a big liner—but real voyages, in good old-fashioned faluchas, better built than they make them now, that went out with wine and came back with sugar, and were owned by gentlemen in cape-coats and top-hats! And every trip with a lamp on board, lighted at the wick floating in the oil bowl before the Christ of the Grao! And a rosary every night on board, without fail, unless you wanted something awful to happen! Those were the days, according to tio Batiste, the real days, for sailormen. And as he cursed on, the wrinkles would wiggle all over his face, and his ancient goatee would whip up and down; while vicious bits of forecastle obscenity would punctuate his contempt for the irreligion and the conceit of the younger generation of salts.

Pascualo liked to hear the old man talk. There was something of his old master, tio Borrasca, about him, and the man reminded him of his father, old Pascualo, too. Though the other members of the crew, Tonet, two sailors and the "cat," made fun of the venerable tar, and tried to get him angry all the time by assuring him he was too old for the business now, and that the curate would be willing to take him on as sacristan. Chentola! Too old for real work, eh! Wait till they got out to sea, and they'd whistle another tune! The boys of these days don't know what a wind is! He'd be fanning himself, while they'd be calling for mama!

The next morning all the Cabin section was in motion. The bou-boats would put to sea that evening after sundown—taking the men-folks offshore for their honest battle with the elements for bread. An annual migration of husbands, brothers and sons, this; but, nevertheless, the women, thinking of the months of worry and uneasiness they would have ahead of them till spring, could never take the event very calmly.

Captains were bustling about with their last preparations. They went down to the harbor to look over their boats, test the pulleys, run the lines, raise and lower the sails, pound the bottom over inside, be sure the supplies of rope and canvas were on hand, count baskets, examine nets. And when inventories were complete they would have still to go back to the office to get clearance papers from all those stuck-up fellows in white collars who could hardly speak to a workingman decently!

When the Rector went home for dinner at noontime, he found sina Tona in the kitchen talking to Dolores, weeping her eyes out, and patting a bundle she held across her knees. When she saw her son coming, she began at him angrily. "I've just heard, and it's a pretty father you are! So Pascualet is going 'cat' on the Mayflower! A boy of eight, who might better be at home with his mother, or at least playing down at the tavern with me! The idea! A baby like that going to sea and made to do a man's work, and Lord knows what else! Well, I'm not going to stand it, I'm not! That's not the way to treat a child! And since his mother don't dare open her head, and his father is actually the one to blame, his grandma must take a hand! I've come to get Pascualet and take him home with me. I won't allow such a thing. Pascualet! Pascualet! Your grandmother wants to see you."

Pascualet came in, the little devil, swallowed up in a suit of yellow baize, barefoot, to be more in character, and with a sash that passed almost under his arm-pits and made his blouse bulge out like a balloon. Cocking his black cap down over one ear, he began to strut up and down in front of the women, imitating the tough and independent manner of tio Batiste, and trying to put some of that worthy's picturesque obscenity into the insults he heaped upon his grandmother for her efforts in his behalf. "I'm through playing at the tavern! You can keep your bread and cheese! I'm a man now, I am; and I'm going 'cat' in the Mayflower!"

His father and mother were in convulsions at the saucy antics of this chip of the old block. As for the Rector, he could have eaten the boy alive with kisses. But sina Tona could only bawl and bawl like a cry-baby, till her son got really angry. "Mama, will you stop that noise! What do you think we are doing to the boy, cutting his throat? The world isn't coming to an end! Pascualet is just going to sea, the way his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather did. What do you want to make of him? A tramp? No, I want him to be a man of pluck, and able to do a day's work, and not be afraid of salt water, where his living is likely to be. If I can leave him a little bit, when I pass on, so much the better; but he ought to be ready to look out for himself. He'll be in no danger. But if he gets to know what a boat is, he'll go to it with his eyes open. Any one can have an accident, afloat or ashore. Just because my father ended the way he did is no signs we're all to end that way. Too much bawling around here! Give us a rest, will you!"

But sina Tona knew they were all possessed of the devil! The sea had her eye on the whole family, and would get them all, finally! She hadn't slept a wink for nights—and the most frightful dreams! Worry and worry about your son! And then you find they're taking the baby, too. No, she couldn't stand it any more. They were bound to kill her with worry and sorrow! If they weren't her children, she wouldn't look them in the face, they were so brutal!

But the Rector, letting the old lady grumble on, sat down to his bowl of steaming soup. "What do you say to dinner, Pascualet! Don't mind her! Your daddy is going to make the best sailor in the Cabanal out of you! Tell us, mama, what you got in that bundle?"

Sina Tona boo-hooed louder than ever at the joking question. A present! A little present, that was all! She thought it would ease her mind. So she had taken what money she had saved—a few pennies it was—and had bought something for him. A life-preserver! A neighbor of hers had gotten it from an engineer on an English steamer! And she produced the huge vest of padded cork, which folded up so easily along the seams! The Rector looked at the strange mechanism and smiled. Did you ever! What things people could think of! "I'd heard there were rigs like that in the world, but I never saw one before. Glad to have it aboard, though I can swim like a fish, myself, and never do it in uniform!" And he was tickled to death, at bottom. He left his soup and tried the life-belt on, laughing at his own stoggy appearance in it; for it made his already generous allowance of paunch still more conspicuous, and he ended by looking and puffing like a seal—for the straps made it hard for him to breathe. "Thanks, thanks! I'll not drown in this. I'll simply strangle. But the Mayflower will like to have it!" And he dropped it to the floor. When Pascualet, tugging and straining, finally got the thing on, his head and feet barely extended beyond the cork armor. He was a tortoise in a shell, for all the world!

The meal was almost over, when Tonet came in, with a huge bandage around his hand. He had just had a bad blow, that morning; and he reported the news in such a way, that his brother did not see fit to ask how nor why; nor was the Rector sharp enough to note the self-conscious expression on the face of Dolores. Up to his usual tricks, that boy! Probably been in another fight in some drinking-place! "But what do you expect you'll be good for outside? All trussed up like that! Never mind this trip. We won't be out more than a day or two, if we have any kind of luck. We'll take you day after to-morrow, or next day!" The Rector talked on very calmly. That temper of his was hard to ruffle! But Tonet and Dolores sat looking at the floor, as though they were ashamed of something.

At four o'clock, the final preparations for the sailing of the fleet began. The bou-boats, two by two, were moored to the harbor wharfs, dipping their masts on the swell as though curtseying to the people ashore, while their hulls went up and down in graceful undulation. Those tiny sea-dogs, with their rough profiles of ancient galleys, made one think of the old armadas of Aragon, or of the fleets of doughty pinnaces with which Roger de Lauria used to spread terror along the coasts of Sicily. And the fishermen, too, as they came down, crew by crew, their clothes and blankets in rolls over their backs, looked like the bands of almogavars that gathered, of old, on the beach of Salou, to sail, in like craft or worse ones, to the conquest of Majorca. A savor of the historic, of the antique, hovered about that fleet and about each separate craft, which took you back, perforce, to sea legends of the Middle Ages, when the triangular sails of Aragon were as dreaded of the Moors of Andalusia as of the isles that lay smiling in the classic seas of Greece.

The whole village was down on the shore. Women and children were running here and there, trying to identify, in the forests of masts, of crossing and criss-crossing cordage, the boats where their own men were. It was the annual excursion into the deserts of the sea, the recurring foray out into danger to snatch bread from the mysteries of the deep, which sometimes gives up its treasures peacefully and without a struggle, but at others hangs on to them and threatens the plucky Argonaut with death.

Down over the gang-planks from wharf to deck moved a procession of bare feet, yellow trousers, sun-baked faces, all that miserable flock of human beings who are born, live and die, on that shore there, knowing nothing of the world that lies beyond that blue horizon. Hunger, on the starting-line, as it were, for a race with death at the signal of opulence! Men condemned to ignorance and filth and danger, that, inland, other men may sit down before glossy linen table-cloths, and feel their mouths water before a succulent lobster's claw on a creamy cod swimming in luscious sauce!

The sun was hanging low. The last flies of summer, their huge bellies swollen and their wings sluggish, were buzzing about in the golden afternoon, gleaming with a sputtering fire. Away to the horizon, which the peak of the Mongo broke with a blotch of haze, like an island floating in the distance, the sea stretched calm and tranquil. Good weather! Good weather! That was the burden of every woman's tongue, as the boats swallowed up crew after crew. With good luck, there would soon be good things a-plenty in every house! Now the "cats" were almost the only sailors left on shore. They were still running up and down the wharves, stamping barefoot on the pitchy floorings, doing the last errands of the captains, putting the hard-tack aboard, and a final cask of wine!

And the sun was down. Everybody—more than a thousand men in all, there were—was now on board. The boats were waiting only for the papers to come down from the offices. How slow those lubbers worked! The spectators on shore were beginning to get impatient, as though the curtain were late in rising on a show.

For still one ceremony had not yet been completed. From time immemorial it had been the custom of the whole village to wish the bou-fleet godspeed by insulting the men who were going away. As the boats cast off, atrocious witticisms flew back and forth between deck and shore—all in good humor, of course, for such tradition would have it, and it was a test of brains, besides, to be able to say just the right word to those lanudos, those husbands whose eyes would be snugly plugged with wool, and come home in blessed ignorance of all their wives had been up to meanwhile! This theme of the wayward wife and the unsuspecting husband is the commonest sport—however cruel it may seem—along the shores of the Levant; and so inveterate the habit, so inevitable the parting serenade, that some of the departing sailors went aboard with pockets or baskets full of stones, to be ready for any thrusts they could not parry with words.

And the last of the after-glow had faded. The lamps along the wharves gleamed like a rosary of fire. Red snakes of light coiled and writhed out over the placid waters of the basin. Stars, green and scarlet, shone from the peak of every mast. The sea was catching the ashen brightness of the nocturnal sky, and boats and buildings stood out in dark outlines of indigo against a vast background of nickel gray. "They're off! They're off!" Sails were being hoisted one by one, and in the night the canvas filtered the harbor lights as through veils of distended crepe, or translucent wings of great black butterflies.

Swarming mobs of ragamuffins had occupied the points farthest projecting seaward. That would give their gibes the greatest possible range. And what fun it would be! But all ready to duck I They've got plenty of stones aboard to-night!

Slowly, gently, with barely perceptible motion in that breath of air, the first pair of boats drew out from the wharf-side, nodding idly on the swells like lazy bulls reluctant to make their dash. It was still possible from the piers to identify the teams and the men aboard them. "Good-by! Good-by!" the women called to their husbands. "Adios! Bon viache!" But the youngsters were already at it, shrieking obscenities into the night in a tumultuous uproar. "Did you ever hear such talk!" Though the very wives who caught allusions to themselves laughed as loudly as any one at the most happy scores. It was one carnival of free language, where truth ran riot with slander.

"Lanudos! Worse than lanudos! I know where the curate is going to stay to-night! Johnnie will take good care of her, don't worry, my lad! Moo-oo! Moo-oo!" And this mooing of cattle was supposed to evoke the image of well-horned oxen in the minds of those brave sailors who were thus being cheered on their way out into peril. But then the stones began to come, whistling like bullets and striking sparks on the rocks where the serenaders were seeking cover. The greatest uproar was at the end of the Breakwater near which every boat had to pass on its way out from the basin. And when the volleys of jest would slacken from the shore, provocation would come from the boats themselves. The sailors seemed offended if their team went past without attention. "And you've nothing to say to us, eh!" some stentorian voice of an old tar would call. "Lanudos! Lanudos!" the answer would come in a storm of shouting, while the "cats" on board would begin to blow on the conches, which the boats used at sea in time of dark or fog.

On one of the rocks, in the full midst of a noisy crowd, and quite indifferent to the flying stones, stood Dolores, alone. The women who had gone down to the shore with her kept farther back away from the line of fire. Yet she was not quite alone. For a man had sauntered carelessly in her direction and finally stopped behind her. The splendid creature felt the warmth of Tenet's breath upon her neck, and her skin tingled under that burning contact. She turned her head and caught one fiery glance from his hungry eyes. And the bandaged hand, which had been drawing feigned groans of pain a few hours before, sought hers in the darkness. Free at last! For once, free! Free from fear of surprise, from thoughts of danger! Neither the Rector nor his son would be at home!

But a sudden shouting of redoubled violence awakened them from their swooning dream of guilty anticipation. "The Rector! There he goes! Flor de Mayo! 'Mayflower'!" And the most rousing of all the send-offs was for him. It was not only the young ones this time. Grown-ups, men and women, joined in the scathing jollity. For Dolores, the beautiful, Dolores, the bewitching, had her enemies in that throng of jealous wives. "Hey, the Rector! Hey, the prize-lanudo! A toreador for you, when you come home! The devil will want you, for the horns you'll have! Is it Jersey or Holstein? Or just any old steer, except a short-horn! And we're telling the truth, for once!"

Tonet grew uneasy. He was in plain sight of the throng. Some one might carry the joke too far! But Dolores showed herself a true daughter of tio Paella! She laughed and laughed, as though the best compliments of the sailing had been for her.

And the Rector was delighted. He had always thought himself the most popular man in town! "And what else have you got to say, mutton-heads?" he challenged, as his boat glided slowly along the shore, his moon-face beaming over the varnished stern of the Mayflower. "What else have you got to say!" That bravado gave impetus to the pointed insolence on the Breakwater. "Look at them over there? Tonet is with Dolores! Tonet is with Dolores! Lanudo! Cuckold! He's leaving a happy home to-night! But Tonet will be there! No vacation for Dolores!"

The Rector let go the tiller and stood up on the stern, livid with anger! "Pigs, hogs, grunters! Morrals! Cochinos!"

It was all very well to make fun of him. But this bringing the name of a woman in, and his brother's too, was going a bit too strong, a bit too strong!



CHAPTER IX

"PROOFS! PROOFS! ROSARIO!"

God had poor folks in mind that year! The women of the Cabanal, crowding the beach in the afternoon, were sure of that. The boats had been out two nights and a day, and they were already coming home. The stiff horizon line was dotted with sails, in pairs, the bou-teams hurrying shoreward before a favoring breeze, like couples of doves yoked by a belt at the water-line. The oldest women along shore could not remember such fishing! Lord, the fish just seemed to be sitting there in solid packs, waiting patiently to be scooped out. The poorest people in town would have plenty to eat for once in their lives.

The boats ran in and anchored a few yards from the surf, lowering their big sails, and swinging round to head the wind, gently, gracefully, pitching. Mobs of dirty calico skirts, red faces and tangled heads rushed to the water's edge in front of each team, the women shrieking, cursing, quarreling, arguing, as to whom the fish should go. Overboard the "cats" jumped into the water that reached their waists, and the other men followed. A straight line of moving baskets formed between vessel and shore, human torsos rising higher and higher above the surface of the sea till bare feet touched dry sand. There the wives of the skippers were on hand to take charge of the catch.

The beach was one sparkling shining display of beauty. The fish were still alive and flopping in the baskets. Rock-salmon, like palpitating carnation petals, lay there wriggling their soft vermilion and gasping frantically for breath. Slimy devil-fish crooked their backs in agony or drew together in masses of squirming, crawling suckers. Flounders, as thin and flat as the sole of a shoe, pounded their tails vigorously about. The wide, kite-like fins of rays, quivered in their sticky glue. But squid, squid, everywhere, the most valuable prey of all! The waters offshore seemed literally alive with squid! And the catch was tremendous. Basket after basket shone with masses of transparent iridescent crystal, the slimy crustaceans waving their tentacles desperately about, setting the black of their receptacles a-glitter with the soft colors of mother-of-pearl.

The stretch of water between the boats and the surf was as crowded as a city street. "Cats" were wading out with flagons of water on their shoulders. The sailors, tired of the lukewarm filthy drink from the hogsheads aboard, longed for a draught from the ice-cold font de Gas. Tiny girls from the cabins along shore, their ragged skirts innocently rolled high above their knees, were splashing about in the puddles, looking at everything with eager curiosity, and filling their aprons with the littlest fish. Some of the vessels were to lie up on shore for a day. And the oxen, owned cooperatively by the village fishermen, splendid mastodontic creatures, yellow and white, were solemnly, majestically, deliberately, lumbering in and out of the water, shaking their enormous double chins with the gravity of Roman senators. Their polished hoofs sank deep into the sand; but they could beach the heaviest boat at a single pull. Driving them, geeing and hawing, was Chepa, a sallow round-shouldered sickly fellow, with the expression of a crabbed witch, on his foetus-like face. He might have been fifty. He might have been fifteen. He was dressed in yellow oilskins, his bare red feet protruding from under the huge baggy trousers, the skin on them showing the outline of every tendon and every bone. As a boat would slowly scrape along up out of the water, a throng of ragged disheveled youngsters would rush down to meet it, running along beside it through the surf like a cortege of nereids and tritons, noisily begging for a handful of cabets!

A market was being improvised right on the beach, and sales were going on in a hub-bub of shouting, cursing, and shaking of fists. The wives of the captains, intrenched behind their overflowing baskets, were going it hammer and tongs with the fish-women who would retail the catch next day at Valencia. When it came to the weighing, the fights would start all over again. The owners would try to keep out the big fish, las piezas gordas; while the buyers would object to including the small fry. Rough scales were being fashioned of baskets hung on ropes, big stones serving as weights. Some gamin from the village, who had been to school, was always on hand to volunteer as book-keeper for the owners, entering the sales in pencil on almost any piece of paper.

The vendors would move the baskets they had bought around with their feet, while the beach-combers looked on covetously. Let a fish slip off and it vanished as though through a hole in the sand. Whenever a new pair of boats came in the crowd would run to a new section of the shore and people from Valencia who had dropped down to see the sight, would find themselves nearly swept off their feet by the rude scrambling mob.

That was a great day for Dolores. For years she had figured on the beach as one in the riot of vendors merely. How she had longed to rise to the class of owners, still to haggle, of course, but to dictate terms, from a vantage point, to that dirty turbulent crowd of lower scum! And now her dream of glory was being realized! She stood sniffing at the air through that disdainful nose of hers, straightening up full height behind her array of baskets; while Tonet—educated in the Royal Navy, if you please—was tending the scales and setting down the figures.

Her keel barely awash in the surf, the Mayflower was waiting for the oxen to drag her up high and dry. The Rector was still aboard, helping his men furl the sail. At times he would stop and look ashore, watching his wife fighting tooth and nail there, and calling out the figures which his brother was to set down. What a woman! Could a queen be prettier! And the poor fellow's chest heaved with pride and joy at the thought that Dolores owed all that glory to him, to him alone.

Forward, on the tip of the bow, Pascualet reared his diminutive and motionless manhood, looking more like a walrus than an eight-year-old boy, the figure-head of the boat, as it were. Barefoot, and as dirty as could be, his shirt-tail out on one side and flapping in the wind, his breast exposed to the sea-air and as tanned and red as the bust of a statue of mud, he was the admiration of a crowd of little beach-combers, who had gathered round, hardly a stitch on their bronzed limbs, so lean and bony from a life-long diet of salt fish.

But what a catch the Rector had made! His boat loaded to the scuppers with squid, and at thirty cents a pound—you figure it up yourself! The penniless idlers on shore surveyed the wonder-worker as though a sea of dollars were pitching and tumbling out there beyond the surf. Chepa came down with his oxen, and the Mayflower began to climb the beach, grating along over the runners that had been laid under her bottom. Pascualo had jumped down from the deck and gone to Dolores, his face wreathed in smiles at sight of her standing there with her apron caught up to hold a peck or more of silver coins that represented her cash sales. Fairly good for two days' work, eh! A few trips like that and they'd have a pretty pile! And there was a good chance for the luck to hold! Old tio Batiste knew where the best places were!

But the Rector stopped and looked at his brother. The bandages on the injured hand had disappeared. So Tonet was in trim again already! That was good news to add to the good catch! He wouldn't miss the next sailing now! And he would see some real fishing, I'll tell you! Just the trouble of hauling them in, with your net full at every shot! "We'll be going out at sunrise, to-morrow morning, to make the best of this run, while it lasts!"

Dolores had sold everything; and she asked her husband if he would be going home. The Rector, however, could not say. He hated to leave the boat. The crew would be going off and getting drunk, let alone that bunch of little devils who would strip her clean of everything that could be carried the moment his back was turned. It would probably keep him busy till way into the night. If he wasn't home by nine o'clock, she had better go to bed. Tonet should go and get his pack ready and say good-by to Rosario; so as to be on the beach an hour before dawn. There would be no waiting in such times!

Dolores looked at her husband and then at Tonet. She said she would be going along. Pascualet did not want to go with her, when she called. He would rather stay down at the boat with papa. Dolores had to start off alone, and the two men stood gazing after her beautiful figure, as, with a graceful swinging of hips and shoulders, it vanished in the distance. Tonet hung-around till after dark, swapping stories and banter with tio Batiste, and discussing the great catch with the men of the crew. He did not leave till the "cat" began to get supper ready on board the Mayflower.

Left to himself, Pascualo began to walk up and down the beach, his hands stuffed into his sash, and the legs of his oilskins rasping noisily as they rubbed together. The shore was quite dark. Here and there a stove could be seen glowing on the deck of some boat, blinking as the figure of a sailor passed in front of it. The sea was shrouded in deep gloom, marked by an occasional flash of phosphorescence. The surf was trickling in with a barely audible moan. Softened by the distance came the voices of some "cats" singing as they made their way toward the Cabanal and stirred some dog to bark along the road. A faint band of reddish light still loitered above the horizon where the sun had sunk behind the housetops.

The Rector did not like that reddish after-glow. His experience at sea had taught him to see in it the signs of unsettled weather. But that thought did not concern him long. The joy of the successful trip was too insistent still. No, things were going well, weren't they! Few men in the world with more reason to be thankful than he! A pretty home! A delicious and a frugal wife! The prospect of building another boat, before the year was out, to go in team with the Mayflower! And then a boy after his own heart! Pascualet took to salt water like a mackerel! Why, in time that youngster would be the best captain along shore! Better off, far, than the happy man in the story who didn't have a shirt to his back! He wouldn't have to worry about cold weather—nor rainy days! And there would be a bit left over for old age!

Gloating over his good fortune, Pascualo quickened his lumbering pace as a corpulent sea-dog, and rubbed his hands with satisfaction. But in the darkness ahead of him a figure suddenly appeared, advancing slowly in his direction. Only a woman! Some beggar, probably, making the rounds of the fleet to pick up a spare fish here and there! And so it goes! How many poor devils there are in the world! Why shouldn't a fellow do a little something for one of them now and then! And the Rector's hand felt at a lump in the end of his sash where he had knotted a few silver coins along with a copper or two.

"Pascualo!" came the call. It was a soft, timid, hesitating voice. "Is that you, Pascualo?"

"Cristo! What a mistake! I took her for a beggar! And it's Rosario! Well, well! Looking for Tonet, I suppose! Now that's too bad! You've missed him! He's just gone home. He'll be there wanting his supper, and wondering where you are!"

But the skipper, overflowing with good humor, was taken somewhat aback when he learned that Rosario was not looking for Tonet at all. She had come to see the Rector! What was up? He had never been on very good terms with his sister-in-law. Queer she should be turning to him! However, there was nothing to be done except hear her through. He stood with folded arms, his eyes turned toward the boat where Pascualet and the other "cat" were dancing back and forth around the soup-kettle. Well, what could he do for her? He was listening! And resignedly he waited for the tale of woe he was sure would come from that figure, so vaguely outlined in the darkness, and afraid, it seemed, to begin to speak.

But Rosario with sudden resolution, threw her head energetically back, nailed two flaming mysterious eyes upon the Rector, and began to talk as though in a hurry to get through with it. She had something to say to him, something that concerned the reputation of the whole family. She could not stand it any longer! She and Pascualo had become the laughing-stock of the whole place.

"Ah! What's this you're saying? The laughing-stock of the whole place! And what are they laughing at me for, silly? Just take a look at me and the Mayflower! Do you see anything specially funny about us?"

"Poor Pascualo!" Rosario said, slowly this time, but in deadly earnest, and with the tone of a person prepared to face the worst, "Pascualo, Dolores is not being true to you."

Pascualo reared like a steer struck with an ax between the eyes. Then he stood dazed for an instant, his great head sunk upon his chest. But it was only for a second. That man had a deep faith in the goodness of things and people. His balance could stand harder buffets from the world than that.

"Hold your tongue, Rosario, your lying tongue, and get out of my sight. You're a liar, a liar, that's what you are!"

Had there been light enough for Rosario to see the Rector's face, she would doubtless have obeyed, frightened. His right foot was kicking at the sand, as though the falsehood were a loathsome worm to be ground under his heel. His arm was doubled up and his fist was clenched. Words seemed to come choking from his throat.

"You rag of a woman! And don't everybody know who you are? A back-biter, a cheap gossip, and a trouble-maker. You hate Dolores! You'd do anything to hurt her! You've driven my poor brother to the dogs with your beastly temper! And now you would dirty the reputation of Dolores! And she's a saint! A saint, do you hear! And a woman like you isn't good enough to kiss the bottom of her shoe, you snake! And now, get out of here, and do it quick, damn quick! Get out of here, or I'll kill you like a rat!"

But Rosario stood there impassively. The calm determination in her did not shrink before those insults and those menacing fists.

"Pascualo, Dolores is not being true to you," she repeated slowly, and with despairing firmness. "She is making a fool of you. And the man ... is ... Tonet!"

The Rector stiffened in speechless fury! And his brother she would bring in too, in that low-down spiteful jealousy of hers!

"Get out of here, I say! Get out of here, Rosario, or I'll kill you as sure as ever you were born!" And he meant it, this time. He had seized her by the two wrists, squeezing them till the bones seemed ready to break, and he threw her around on her heels. But in sudden fear, she wrenched loose, and sidled away, to a safe distance, muttering and protesting. She was not a liar, nor a jealous gossip. She had meant to do him a favor. Keep him from looking like a fool to the town. But if he was satisfied, why should any one else care? He could go on being the happy cuckold, and joy go with him. And she made off, on the run, throwing back, in insolent mockery, the epithets that had been rained on Pascualo the day the Mayflower put to sea: "Steer, hornpate, llanut!"

The Rector, his arms folded, stood looking after her till she was out of sight in the dark. Then a sense of duty well done came over his unsuspecting innocence. "Well, did you ever see anything like that? God, imagine being married to her! Poor Tonet! Swallows everything she hears, and tries to use it to get even! But I guess she got all she wanted from me! That will teach her to come tale-bearing another time. God, what a wench!" And puffing with self-righteousness, he resumed his walk, scarcely noticing that the wash from the surf was now reaching his big boots. "God, what a woman!"

But, all of a sudden, the Rector stopped. It was as though something had been brewing silently in the unconscious recesses of his soul, and then had rapidly boiled up, catching in his throat, strangling him, filling his whole being with mortal anguish.

"She said ... and ... supposing it were true! How do I know she is lying!"

As Pascualo followed this trend of thought, he stamped and splashed up and down on the wet sands, driving his nails into his hands, and swearing under his breath as he swore only at sea when a blow was on. See here ... Tonet was engaged to Dolores once! It was Tonet who had taken him to her house, in the first place. The two were together a great deal of the time. She was always talking to him about Tonet! Tonet this, Tonet that! "And I ... I ... never ... God ... the last to suspect anything! The laughing-stock of the Gulf! And yet ... bah ... impossible!" How that damned woman would like to see him get upset, and make trouble the way she did! Be taken in like that? Not a grown-up man, like him! And besides, what had the wench said! Nothing but what Roseta had said, and hundreds of others, but just to worry him! The men on the beach always had jokes like that on each other, to make things lively. But it was just fun! Whereas that Rosario was trying to make trouble, she was! Spiteful as a mad cat! "Bosh, lies, lies! I stand by Dolores, through thick and thin! And that boy of ours! Pascualet, the little major! And what a regular old salt, though hardly as big as a chipmunk! Mentira! Tot mentira!"

And the Rector stamped and splashed on up and down the beach, talking aloud, stopping, shrugging his shoulders and gesticulating, inviting the sea, the boats, the very shadows of the night, to say whether it was not all a damned lie of that crazy female. Though a wicked devil was lurking somewhere inside him; for every time that he said "lie," and the objects of the night said "lie," the word echoed within him as "Llanut, bruto, steer, bull, ox—with horns!"

"And, by God, if it is true ..." What he had said to Roseta that afternoon on the way home through the Grao, came into his mind. Tonet, Dolores ... yes, even Pascualet ... if one of them laid a finger on his honor! "And wait a minute! A woman like that, to get even with Dolores, would slander her in public! But would she come to me intimate-like, all by ourselves. No, it would take courage to do that! She'd need to have good grounds ... Fool I was not to let her talk ... then I'd know the very worst!" And anything, at that moment, seemed to the Rector preferable to his state of anxious, raging torment.

"Pare! Pare!" a cheery little voice began to call from the deck of the Mayflower. Supper was ready! Supper! Who could care about supper with that mess on a fellow's mind! The Rector strode up to the boat, and in a tone that was surprisingly harsh and commanding, told the men to eat their meal and go to bed, for he had something to attend to in town. If he didn't come back, they were to get up and have things ready for the start at sunrise.

Pascualo did not look at his little son, but darted, like a phantom, off along the black shore, running into boats at times, then stumbling into the deep puddles that the sea had dug out in the sand in stormy weather. But he was feeling better! It was a relief to be thinking that he would soon be talking to Rosario again. Those terrible insults she had hurled at him had stopped hurting. His brain was no longer that whirl of mad desperate ravings! He seemed to be walking on air, instead, as though his heavy body were a feather! Yet there was still a griping sensation in his throat, that caught his breath; and when he swallowed, his mouth had the bitter taste of brine. To the last word! To the last word! She would tell every blessed thing she knew, or she'd be sorry! Recristo, who would have said two hours before that after such a trip offshore, he would be sneaking off to the house of a woman he despised, and through the back streets so no one would see him! What a devil of a woman! Stuck the knife in just the right spot! How was it that five words from a chatter-box could spoil a man's soul like that!

He was almost running as he entered a dirty street in one of the most miserable sections of the village, lines of dwarf olives on either hand, the sidewalks filthy with trodden dirt, and lined with two rows of shacks, the front yards fenced in with old boards. The door of Rosario's cottage was closed. He ran into it with a violence that almost snapped the latch, and as it swung open, it banged violently against the wall behind. In the murky light of a single candle, Rosario was sitting on a stool, her head between her hands. Her demeanor of sorrow and despair was quite in harmony with the desolate, ill-furnished interior of that hovel—a table, a couple of chairs, two chromos on the wall for decoration, an old mandolin, and some abandoned fish-nets. The place, as the women of the neighborhood said, had the smell of hunger and wife-beating.

Rosario looked up as the door slammed open, and the Rector's massive figure towered over the threshold, completely filling the door-way. "Oh, it's you!" she said with a bitter smile. She had been waiting for him. She knew he would come. Wouldn't he have a chair? He had been rough with her down on the beach, but she didn't mind. "We all feel that way at first! I couldn't believe it when they first told me about Tonet. I slapped the face of the woman who came to me. And then, an hour later, I went and asked her for God's sake to tell the truth. Well, you were going to kill me a little while ago. And here you are! When people are really in love ... they get mad at first. But then they want to know the truth, even if it pulls the heart out of them! We are both fools, Pascualo!"

The Rector had closed the door behind him, and was standing now in front of his sister-in-law, his arms folded, looking at her with a scowl of angry hostility, the instinctive hatred a man feels toward the one who wrecks his dream.

"The truth, now! The truth! Speak out! All you've got to say!" Pascualo hissed the threatening words, to put a stop to that everlasting moralizing of an idiot! Would she never get to the point? Yet, in all his menacing, raging impatience, there was terror in his soul, the wish that minutes might turn, almost, to centuries, to postpone the cruel revelation.

Well, yes, she would tell him everything! But how would he take it? What she had to say would hurt him terribly, and he must not hate her so for it. She had had her time of it too. She had suffered now till she could stand it no longer. She hated Tonet, and she hated that infamous Dolores! For her Pascualo was simply a comrade in misfortune. Dolores had been deceiving him. "Oh, it's not a matter of yesterday or day before. They've been carrying on for years—almost from the time Tonet and I were married. Tonet was a good boy. But when that thing saw some one else have him for a husband, she set her eyes on him, and she was the one who first led him astray."

"Bosh!" roared the Rector, blind with fury and anguish. "I want proofs! I'm tired of your talk. Proofs! Proofs, Rosario! And be quick about it."

Rosario smiled pityingly at sight of such a fool! "Proofs! Proofs! Why don't you ask the whole village for proofs, proofs! They've been laughing at you for a year or more. It has been the talk of the town. You won't get angry at me? You want the whole truth? Well, even the 'cats' and the sailors on the beach, when they want to say that a man's wife is deceiving him, call him a worse lanudo than the Rector."

"Damn your soul!" Pascualo roared, clenching his fist and shaking it in Rosario's face. "Rosario ... Look, Rosario, be careful what you say. Because ... if you don't make good on every blessed word of it ... I'll wring your neck the way I would a chicken's."

"I wish you would! I'm tired of living. What have I to live for? No children! Not a friend in the world! Work like a dog from morning till night, to give him the money I earn so as to escape a beating. And he beats me just the same! Wring my neck! That doesn't scare me! Look, Pascualo, look!"

Rosario rolled up her sleeve, and showed on the sallow skin that covered the bones and tendons of her fore-arm, the black-and-blue marks where a heavy hand had squeezed it as in a vise. "And that's only one. I can show you others almost anywhere on my body! And they come from having complained about his bad behavior with Dolores! This one here I got this morning, when I said he ought not go to the beach with her and help her sell the fish as though he was her husband. And I said it wasn't fair to make a fool of the Rector in public like that! But you want proofs, proofs! Well, why didn't Tonet go out with you on the first trip two days ago? He hurt his hand, didn't he? Yes, but his hand got well the moment the Mayflower was beyond the Breakwater. And the next morning there wasn't a bandage to be seen. And everybody noticed it. And you went to sea, to stay up all night, in the cold and wet, to keep your home going for your wife, your dear Dolores! And Tonet stayed all warm and cosy at home with her, the pair of them laughing to see what a stupid, self-satisfied idiot you were! Tonet didn't sleep in this house after you sailed. And he's not here even to-night. He ran in a few moments ago, got his things and was off, saying he wouldn't be back again. And where is he, Pascualo? Over at your house of course! They are sure the Mayflower will keep you down on the shore all night. And Tonet is preparing to make himself at home in your place!"