"Since that is the case, I think we shall do well by starting without further delay." "We are at your orders, Señorita." "Stay, my good man," El Alferez added in a soft voice, and addressing the pulquero, "take this in recollection of me." The good man, half stunned by what he saw, mechanically held out his right hand, into which the mysterious adventurer carelessly let a gold onza fall; then, taking Don Serapio's arm, he went out, preceded by Don Cristoval and Ramirez, who hurried to get the boat ready. The pulquero stood in his doorway, and looked after the strange visitors who had spent the whole night in his house, as long as he could see them; then he went in again, shaking his head thoughtfully, and muttering, as he jingled the coin he had received--"All this is not clear; a man who is a woman, friends who do not recognize each other after two hours' conversation, that is preciously queer; I am certain something is going to happen. But hang me if I mix myself up in it; it is well, in certain circumstances, to know how to hold one's tongue; besides, it is no business of mine; the money they gave me is good, and I have no right to look further." Strengthened by this philosophic reasoning, and filled with prudence, the pulquero closed his door, and went to bed in order to fetch up by day the sleep his singular curiosities had made him lose during the night. [1] What rumour resounds in the distance which interrupts the placid silence of the dark night? [2] Can it be the rapid gallop of a horse urged along a narrow road--or the ferocious howling of a starving beast of prey--or, perchance, the whistling of the north-west wind? CHAPTER XIX. AT SEA. It was about four in the morning; the dawn was beginning to mark the horizon with wide white bands; on the extreme line of the water, a bright red reflection, the harbinger of sunrise, announced that the sun would soon appear. At this moment a light brig gradually emerged from the dense fog that hid it, and could be seen sailing close to the wind along the dangerous and rugged coast which forms the entrance of Galveston Bay, at the mouth of the Rio Trinidad. It was a neat vessel of three hundred tons at the most, with a gracefully-built hull, and its tall masts coquettishly raking. The rigging was carefully painted and tarred, the yards symmetrically square, and more than all, the menacing muzzles of four eight-pounder carronades which peered out of the bulwarks on either side, and the long thirty-two pounder swivel in the bows, indicated that, although a man-of-war pennant might not be flying from the mainmast, it was not the less resolved, in case of necessity, to fight energetically against the cruisers that might attempt to check its progress.