most sizeable wreck of the blow, and the
newspapers in town gave columns to it. The population of Valencia turned
out as on a pilgrimage to look at the hulk, half sunken in the shifting
sands. No one gave a thought to the lost fishing boats, and people
seemed not to understand the wailing and lamentations of the poor women
whose men had not come home.

The disaster to the fleet was not, however, so great as they had
thought. The morning wore on and several boats came in that had been
given up for lost. Some had made Denia or Gandia. Others had taken
refuge in Cullera Harbor. And each craft that appeared roused cheers of
rejoicing and thanksgiving throughout the village, which joyfully made
vows to all the saints who look after men of the sea.

In the end only one was not accounted for--the boat of _tio_ Pascualo,
the most thrifty saver of all the savers in the Cabanal, a man,
decidedly, with an eye for money, a fisherman in winter and a smuggler
in summer, a great skipper, and a frequent visitor to the coasts of
Algiers and Oran, which he spoke of always as "across the way," as
though Africa were on the sidewalk across the street.

Pascualo's wife, Tona, spent more than a week on the Breakwater, a
suckling baby in her arms and another child, a chubby little lad,
clinging to her skirts. She was sure Pascualo would come home; and every
time a fresh detail of the storm was given her, she would tear her hair
and renew her screams for the Holy Virgin's help. The fishermen never
talked right out to her, but always stopped at the significant shrug of
the shoulders. They had seen Pascualo last off the Cabo, drifting before
the gale, dismasted. He could not have gotten in. One man had even seen
a huge green wave break over him, taking the boat abeam, though he could
not swear the craft had foundered.

In alternate spells of desperation and strange exhilarated hope, the
miserable woman waited and waited with her two children. On the twelfth
day, a revenue cutter came into the port of the Cabanal, towing _tio_
Pascualo's boat behind, bottom-up, blackened, slimy and sticky, floating
weirdly like a big coffin and surrounded by schools of fish, unknown to
local waters, that seemed bent on getting at a bait they scented through
the seams of the wrecked hull.

The craft was righted and grounded on the sand. The masts were off even
with the deck. The hold was full of water. When the fishermen went down
inside to bail her out with p