The fact is, that Samuel Bilbao was notorious from Fiji to Terra del Fuego as one of the last of the wild, flamboyant traders who had hunted the blackbirders down in the South Seas slaving days of ten years before. Yes, it was Samuel Bilbao who stood beside Clensy; Bilbao who ran the blockade in the Haytian revolution of three years before; Bilbao who led the Marquesans in the great tribal battle at Taiohae; Bilbao who helped the Tahitian chiefs when they fought the French in 18—, and smashed a well-equipped garrison to smithereens. Yes, such things had been accomplished by that worthy in the splendour of his prime.
When Clensy discovered that he was on the high seas with Samuel Bilbao as his right hand, he blessed the fates. “Things could be worse,” he thought.
Samuel Bilbao, to give him his proper name, was the life of the _Prince_. The Haytian ladies on board tried hard to blush as he sang his rollicking songs, extemporising words in their own language as his versatile brain took in the degrees of temperament and the moral lassitude of the female company he sang to. He infused life and laughter into the hearts of the most woebegone refugees as he danced and made the _Prince’s_ deck like a moonlit ball-room as they steamed along under the stars. Yes, Samuel Bilbao was the best comrade Clensy could have found under the circumstances.
It seemed like the memory of some feverish dream when Clensy, one month after flying from Hayti, sat in the Rio Grande café at M— and thought of all that he and Bilbao had gone through in their search for Sestrina. “And all for nothing! Sestrina might have been swallowed up by an earthquake for all we’ve heard to the contrary,” Clensy muttered, as he looked through the open window on to the palm groves that faced the veranda. “Thank heaven I’ve got enough money to take the next boat that sails for Honolulu,” he thought, as he counted out his notes and gold. He had only the day before received a generous remittance from England by cable. And, as he reflected and mused on, he murmured: “There’s still a good chance that we’ve missed her; there’s several ways of getting to Hawaii. She might have got on a schooner that sailed from the lower Californian seaboard harbours.” And as Clensy mused on and thought over all the possibilities, he became very hopeful.