The captain, however, was not put off. He had nothing to do. “Do you know?” he asked, when the mate came below him again. “Know what, sir?” Marsden was thinking his own thoughts. He had not paid much attention. “Who that fellow is?” “Man named Stanwood,” said the first-officer, and he tried to head the captain off by another order to the hold. It was accompanied by profanity. The delay was nobody’s fault, but, as is frequently the case, the oaths expended in one direction were inspired from another. It was a pity the captain couldn’t go aft and work a reckoning, or talk to the passengers. Not that he objected to the captain. The captain was a very good sort. It was the topic Marsden disliked. “Stanwood--rather imposing for a _lanchero_ in there with all them black brutes, aint it? Not that he’s any cleaner, though. Who told you it was that?” “Nobody,” said Marsden; “I know it.” It broke in upon the captain then that he was being discouraged. “Oh!” he said. There followed a pause. “You’d better have a new rope through that block there when you’re ready to hoist those iron chimney stacks.” “Yes, sir,” answered the mate. The captain strolled off to the quarter-deck to watch the second-steward fishing for sharks. But time was not hanging heavy on Marsden’s hands. There was a look of bad weather, and if they were to get off that night, as might prove highly desirable, there had got to be a lot more hustling than the _lancheros_ seemed capable of. The launch alongside had about all it could carry, and its _capitan_ was calling for the tug, the soft, mournful note of his conch shell floating over the water to the shore. Marsden, by way of losing no time himself, ran up to the hurricane-deck and on to the bridge, and the whistle screeched across the blue-green of the sea, glinting in the sun, across the little port among its palms, and beyond through the lush jungle of the piling mountains, where the trees and vines and undergrowth matted in the moist, breathless temperature of a green-house. There were black clouds piling up behind the mountains, and rolling low into the great cañons and clefts of palm and fern trees. Marsden eyed them as he went below again. The launch alongside was loaded and sent adrift, to be picked up by the tug and towed back to the wharf. The tug was bringing out the other one--the one in which Stanwood was of the crew. Marsden wished that he were not. A man may have been your enemy. He may have brought about your finish. You may have thought for years that nothing could be too bad for him. But all the same--if he is a white man, one of your own kind, be he never so much of a scoundrel, it is not good to see him working among Central American _lancheros_, under a _capitan_ of the same breed. It is a trifle too low. He is one of your own race, after all, and it hits you through the race.