looking
dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of
birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them,
and it had doubtless come to that.

One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity
which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened
hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship's run
were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those
set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one
near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds
of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she
was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on
the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the
violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the
machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been
impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.

XI

THE AMIGO

His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody
called him the _amigo_, because that was the endearing term by which
he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called
him "Span-yard" in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish,
and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they
were English, he answered to the call of "Span-yard!" whenever he
heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly
if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning
spirits, he was always the _amigo_, for, when he hailed you so, you
could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you
afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.

The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first
hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention
in the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with
outspread arms, and a joyful cry of "Ah, _amigo_!" as if we were now
meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogota; and the
_amigo_ clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly
speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in
a long black overcoat, and a boy's knee-pants, and under the peak of
his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a
smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was m