ood reason for wishing her far away from San Francisco.

A face appeared to him; at the first glimpse of it Coronado slipped into
the nearest doorway, and from that moment his chief anxiety was to cause
the girl to vanish. Yes, he must get her started on her voyage, even at
the risk of her continuing it.

"What the devil is he here for?" he muttered. "Has he found out that she
is living?"

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

At noon the Lolotte, a broad-beamed, flat-floored brig of light draught
and good sailing qualities, hove up her anchor and began beating out of
the Bay of San Francisco, with Coronado and Clara on her quarter-deck.

"You have no other passengers, I understood you to say, captain," observed
Coronado, who was anxious on that point, preferring there should be none.

The master, a Dane by birth named Jansen, who had grown up in the American
mercantile service, was a middle-sized, broad-shouldered man, with a red
complexion, red whiskers, and a look which was at once grave and fiery. He
paused in his heavy lurching to and fro, looked at the Mexican with an air
which was civil but very stiff, and answered in that discouraging tone
with which skippers are apt to smother conversation when they have
business on hand, "Yes, sir, one other."

Coronado presently slipped down the companionway, found the colored
steward, chinked five dollars into his horny palm, and said, "My good
fellow, you must look out for me; I shall want a good deal of help during
the passage."

"Yes, sah, very good, sah," was the answer, uttered in a greasy chuckle,
as though it were the speech of a slab of bacon fat. "Make you up any
little thing, sah. Have a sup now, sah? Little gruel? Little brof?"

"No, thank you," returned Coronado, turning half sick at the mention of
those delicacies. "Nothing at present. By the way, one of the staterooms
is occupied I see. Who is the other passenger?"

"Dunno, sah; keeps hisself shut up, an' says nothin' to nobody. 'Pears
like he is sailin' under secret orders. Cur'ous' lookin' old gent; got
only one eye."

One eye! Coronado thought of the face which had frightened him out of San
Francisco, and wondered whether he were shut up in the Lolotte with it.

"One eye?" he asked. "Short, stout, dark old gentleman? Indeed! I think I
know him."

Stepping to the door of a stateroom which he had already noticed as being
kept closed, he tapped lightly. There was a muttering inside, a shuffling
as of some on