Just then Tomas himself stalked into sight among the men forward. Coming round the corner of the deck-house, he stopped at the galley door like a crow outside a hut, waiting. We watched him getting a light for his cigarette at the galley door with much dignified pantomime. The negro cook of the _Lion_, holding out to him in the doorway a live coal in a pair of tongs, turned his Ethiopian face and white ivories towards a group of sailors lost in the contemplation of the proceedings.’ And, when Castro had passed them, spurting jets of smoke, they swung about to look after his short figure, upon whose draped blackness the sunlight brought out reddish streaks as if bucketfuls of rusty water had been thrown over him from hat to toe. The end of his broken plume hung forward aggressively. “Look how the fellow struts! Night and thunder! Hey, Don Tenebroso! Would your worship hasten hither....” Sebright hailed jocularly. Castro, without altering his pace, came up to us. “What do you think of her now?” asked Sebright, pointing to the strange sail. “She’s grown a bit plainer, now she is out of the glare.” Castro, wrapping his chin, stood still, face to the sea. After a long while: “Malediction,” he pronounced slowly, and without moving his head shot a sidelong glance at me. “It’s clear enough how _he_ feels about our friends over there. Malediction. Just so. Very proper. But it seems as though he had a bone to pick with all the world,” drawled Sebright, a little sleepily. Then, resuming his briskness, he bantered, “So you don’t want to go to England, Mr. Castro? No friends there? _Sus. per col._, and that sort of thing?” Castro, contemptuous, staring straight away, nodded impatiently. “But this gentleman you are so devoted to is going to England--to his friends.” Castro’s arms shook under the mantle falling all round him straight from the neck. His whole body seemed convulsed. From his puckered dark lips issued a fiendish and derisive squeal. “Let his friends beware, then. _Por Dios!_ Let them beware. Let them pray and fast, and beg the intercession of the saints. Ha! ha! ha!...” Nothing could have been more unlike his saturnine self-centred truculence of restraint. He impressed me; and even Sebright’s steady, cool eyes grew perceptibly larger before this sarcastic fury. Castro choked; the rusty, black folds encircling him shook and heaved. Unexpectedly he thrust out in front of the cloak one yellow, dirty little hand, side by side with the bright end of his fixed blade. “What do I hear? To England! Going to England! Ha! Then let him hasten there straight! Let him go straight there, I say--I, Tomas Castro!”