O’Brien interposed deferentially. “Señorita, I ask him to come to Rio,” he said. She turned her large dark eyes scrutinizingly upon me, then dropped them again. She was arranging some melon seeds in a rayed circle round the lizard that looked motionlessly at her. “Do not speak very loudly, lest you awaken my father,” she warned us. The old Don’s face was still turned to the ceiling. Carlos, standing behind his chair, opened his mouth a little in a half smile. I was really angry with O’Brien by that time, with his air of omniscience, superiority, and self-content, as if he were talking to a child or someone very credulous and weak-minded. “What right have you to speak for me, Señor Juez?” I said in the best Spanish I could. The young girl looked at me once more, and then again looked down. “Oh, I can speak for you,” he answered in English, “because I know. Your position’s this.” He sat down in his rocking chair, crossed his legs, and looked at me as if he expected me to show signs of astonishment at his knowing so much. “You’re in a hole. You must leave this island of Jamaica--surely it’s as distressful as my own dear land--and you can’t go home, because the runners would be after you. You’re ‘wanted’ here as well as there, and you’ve nowhere to go.” I looked at him, quite startled by this view of my case. He extended one plump hand towards me, and still further lowered his voice. “Now, I offer you a good berth, a snug berth. And ’tis a pretty spot.” He got a sort of languorous honey into his voice, and drawled out, “The--the Señorita’s.” He took an air of businesslike candour. “You can help us, and we you; we could do without you better than you without us. Our undertaking--there’s big names in it, just as in the Free Trading you know so well, don’t be saying you don’t--is worked from Havana. What we need is a man we can trust. We had one--Nichols. You remember the mate of the ship you came over in. He was Nicola el Demonio; he won’t be any longer--I can’t tell you why, it’s too long a story.” I did remember very vividly that cadaverous Nova Scotian mate of the _Thames_, who had warned me with truculent menaces against showing my face in Rio Medio. I remembered his sallow, shiny cheeks, and the exaggerated gestures of his claw-like hands.