igging were about the chains; and
there, peering from behind a great stay, like an Indian from behind a
hemlock, a Spanish sailor, a marlingspike in his hand, was seen, who
made what seemed an imperfect gesture towards the balcony, but
immediately as if alarmed by some advancing step along the deck within,
vanished into the recesses of the hempen forest, like a poacher.

What meant this? Something the man had sought to communicate, unbeknown
to any one, even to his captain. Did the secret involve aught
unfavorable to his captain? Were those previous misgivings of Captain
Delano's about to be verified? Or, in his haunted mood at the moment,
had some random, unintentional motion of the man, while busy with the
stay, as if repairing it, been mistaken for a significant beckoning?

Not unbewildered, again he gazed off for his boat. But it was
temporarily hidden by a rocky spur of the isle. As with some eagerness
he bent forward, watching for the first shooting view of its beak, the
balustrade gave way before him like charcoal. Had he not clutched an
outreaching rope he would have fallen into the sea. The crash, though
feeble, and the fall, though hollow, of the rotten fragments, must have
been overheard. He glanced up. With sober curiosity peering down upon
him was one of the old oakum-pickers, slipped from his perch to an
outside boom; while below the old negro, and, invisible to him,
reconnoitering from a port-hole like a fox from the mouth of its den,
crouched the Spanish sailor again. From something suddenly suggested by
the man's air, the mad idea now darted into Captain Delano's mind, that
Don Benito's plea of indisposition, in withdrawing below, was but a
pretense: that he was engaged there maturing his plot, of which the
sailor, by some means gaining an inkling, had a mind to warn the
stranger against; incited, it may be, by gratitude for a kind word on
first boarding the ship. Was it from foreseeing some possible
interference like this, that Don Benito had, beforehand, given such a
bad character of his sailors, while praising the negroes; though,
indeed, the former seemed as docile as the latter the contrary? The
whites, too, by nature, were the shrewder race. A man with some evil
design, would he not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was
blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might
not be hidden? Not unlikely, perhaps. But if the whites had dark secrets
concerning Don Beni