Sometimes they would fall a-shouting all together, and then keep quiet as if listening. By-and-by I began to hear answering yells, that seemed to converge upon us from all directions. We were in the thick of it. It was Manuel’s boat, as Castro had guessed, and the other boats were rallying upon it gropingly, keeping up a succession of yells: “_Ohe! Ohe!_ Where, where?” And the people in Manuel’s boat howled back at them, “_Ohe! Ohe...e!_ This way; here!” Suddenly he struck the guitar a mighty blow, and chanted in an inspired and grandiose strain: “Steer--for--the--song.” His fingers ran riot among the strings, and above the jingling his voice, forced to the highest pitch, declaimed, as in the midst of a tempest: “I adore the saints in the glory of heaven And, on the dust of the earth, The print of her footsteps.” He was improvising. Sometimes he gasped; the rill of softened tinkle ran on, and, glaring watchfully, I fancied I could detect his shape in the white vapour, like a shadow thrown from afar by a tallow dip upon a snowy sheet--the lank droop of his posturing, the greasy locks, the attentive poise of his head, the sentimental rolling of his lustrous and enormous eyes. I had not forgotten his astonishing display in the cabin of the schooner when, after the confiding of his woes and his ambitions, he had favoured me with a sample of his art. As at that time, when he had been nursing his truculent conceit, he sang, and the unsteady twanging of his guitar lurched and staggered far behind his voice, like a drunken slave in the footsteps of a raving master. Tinkle, tinkle, twang! A headlong rush of muddled fingering; a sudden bang, like a heavy stumble. “She is the proud daughter of the old Castile! _Olà! Olà!_” he chanted mysteriously at the beginning of every stanza in a rapturous and soft ecstasy, and then would shriek, as though he had been suddenly cast up on the rock. The poet of Rio Medio was rallying his crew of thieves to a rhapsody of secret and unrequited passion. _Twang, ping, tinkle tinkle_. He was the _Capataz_ of the valiant _Lugareños_! The true _Capataz!_ The only _Capataz. Olà! Olà! Twang, twang_. But he was the slave of her charms, the captive of her eyes, of her lips, of her hair, of her eyebrows, which, he proclaimed in a soaring shriek, were like rainbows arched over stars. It was a love-song, a mournful parody, the odious grimacing of an ape to the true sorrow of the human face. I could have fled from it, as from an intolerable humiliation. And it would have been easy to pull away unheard while he sang, but I had a plan, the beginning of a plan, something like the beginning of a hope. And for that I should have to use the fog for the purpose of remaining within earshot.