“Let us get under way, dear friend,” said the Jefe. “And then, when the fever-shock has departed, we will discuss the matter with reason, being reasonable creatures ourselves and not animals.”
“How much?” Captain Rosaro repeated again. “I am never an animal. I always am a creature of reason, whether the sun is up or not up, or whether this thrice-accursed fever is upon me. How much?”
“Well, let us start, and for how much?” the Jefe conceded wearily.
“Fifty dollars gold,” was the prompt answer.
“You are starting anyway, are you not, Capitan?” Torres queried softly.
The Jefe Politico threw up his hands with a hopeless gesture and turned on his heel to depart.
“Yet you swore eternal vengeance for the crime committed on your jail,” Torres reminded him.
“But not if it costs fifty dollars,” the Jefe snapped back, out of the corner of his eye watching the shivering captain for some sign of relenting.
“Fifty gold,” said the Captain, as he finished draining the mug and with shaking fingers strove to roll a cigarette. He nodded his head in the direction of the Swede, and added, “and five gold extra for my engineer. It is our custom.”
Torres stepped closer to the Jefe and whispered:
“I will pay for the tug myself and charge the Gringo Regan a hundred, and you and I will divide the difference. We lose nothing. We shall make. For this Regan pig instructed me well not to mind expense.”
As the sun slipped brazenly above the eastern horizon, one gendarme went back into Las Palmas with the jaded horses, the rest of the party descended to the deck of the tug, the Swede dived down into the engine-room, and Captain Rosaro, shaking off his chill in the sun’s beneficent rays, ordered the deck-hands to cast off the lines, and put one of them at the wheel in the pilot-house.
And the same day-dawn found the _Angelique_, after a night of almost perfect calm, off the mainland from which she had failed to get away, although she had made sufficient northing to be midway between San Antonio and the passages of Bocas del Toro and Cartago. These two passages to the open sea still lay twenty-five miles away, and the schooner truly slept on the mirror surface of the placid lagoon. Too stuffy below for sleep in the steaming tropics, the deck was littered with the sleepers. On top the small house of the cabin, in solitary state, lay Leoncia. On the narrow runways of deck on either side lay her brothers and her father. Aft, between the cabin companionway and the wheel, side by side, Francis’ arm across Henry’s shoulder, as if still protecting him, were the two Morgans. On one side of the wheel, sitting, with arms on knees and head on arms, the negro-Indian skipper slept, and just as precisely postured, on the other side of the wheel, slept the helmsman, who was none other than Percival, the black Kingston negro. The waist of the schooner was strewn with the bodies of the mixed-breed seamen, while for’ard, on the tiny forecastlehead, prone, his face buried upon his folded arms, slept the lookout.