"We will be all night getting across," growled suddenly the man on his left. ". . . I don't know what Barbone was thinking of to get this antiquity out of his bed." "I told him there was hardly any breath in my old body," declared the boatman's tranquil voice. Apparently in order to speak he had to cease rowing, for he rested on his oars while he went on in the grave-like silence. "But he raged like a devil; and rather than let him wake up all the neighbours I came out. I may just as well die in the boat as in bed." Both _sbirri_ exclaimed indignantly against Barbone, but neither offered to take the sculls. With a painful groan the old man began to pull again. Cosmo asked: "What's that dark thing between the heads of the jetties?" One of his captors, turning his head to look, said, "That must be the galley. I wish she would come this way. We would ask her for a tow." The other man remarked sarcastically, "No fear, they are all snoozing in her except one perhaps to keep a lookout. It's an easy life. . . . _Voga, vecchio, yoga._" Cosmo thought suddenly that if by any chance the man-of-war boat happened to be pulling that way he would hail her without hesitation, and, surely, the officer in charge would not leave him in the hands of those villains without at least listening to his tale. Unluckily their way across the harbour did not take them near the man-of-war. The light at her mizzen peak seemed to Cosmo very far away; so that if it had not burned against the dark background of the land it would have seemed more distant than any star, and not half as brightly vigilant. He took his eyes from it and let them rest idly on the water ahead. The _sbirro_ on his right hand emitted an immense yawn. This provided the other to mutter curses on the tediousness of all this affair. Cosmo had been too perplexed to feel bored. Just then as if in antagonism to those offensive manifestations he felt very alert. Moreover, the moment when something would have to be done was approaching, a tension of all his senses accumulating in a sort of all-over impatience. While in that state, staring into the night, he caught sight of the man-of-war's boat. But was it?--well, it was something dark on the water, and as there was no other boat about . . . It was small--well, far off and probably end on. . . . He had heard no sound of rowing . . . lying on her oars . . . He could see nothing now . . . well, here goes, on the chance.