ne advanced the placid
looking-glass gave way to a livid menacing chop, and piles of cloud came
racing up from the horizon and blotted out the sun.

Great was the alarm along shore. In the eyes of those poor people,
familiar with all the tragedies of the sea, wind from that quarter
always meant one of those storms that bring sorrow and mourning to the
homes of fishermen. In dismay, their skirts whipping in the blow, the
women ran back and forth along the water's edge, wailing and praying to
all the saints they trusted. The men at home, pale and frowning, bit
nervously at the ends of their cigars, and, from the lee of the boats
drawn up on the sand, studied the lowering horizon with the tense
penetrating gaze of sailormen, or nervously watched the harbor entrance
beyond the Breakwater on whose red rocks the first storm waves were
breaking. What was happening to so many husbands and fathers caught with
their nets down off shore? Each succeeding squall, as it sent the
terrified watchers staggering along the beach, called up the thought of
strong masts snapping at the level of the deck and triangular sails torn
to shreds, perhaps at that very moment!

About three o'clock on the black horizon a line of sails appeared,
driving before the gale like puffs of foam that vanished suddenly in the
troughs of the waves to dart back into view again on the crests
succeeding. The fleet was returning like a frightened herd in stampede,
each boat plunging in the combers with the bellow of the tempest upon
its heels. Would they make the lee of the Breakwater? The wind in
devilish playfulness would here tear off a shred of canvas, there a
yard, and there a mast or a tiller, till a rudderless craft, caught
abeam by a mountain of greenish water, would seem surely to be swallowed
up. Some of the boats got in. The sailors, drenched to the skin,
accepted the embraces of their wives and children impassively, with
vacant and expressionless eyes, like corpses suddenly resurrected from
the tomb.

That night was long remembered in the Cabanal.

Frenzied women, with their hair down and lashing in the hurricane, their
voices hoarse from the prayers they shouted above the howling gale,
spent the whole night on the Breakwater, in danger of being swept off by
the towering surf, soaked with the brine from the biting spray, and
peering out into the blackness as though bent on witnessing the
lingering agony of the last stragglers.

Many boats did not a