inches
from the deck; but the passage that he made for himself closed behind
him.

Suddenly, in the pushing and hurrying, I came upon a little clear space
beside a pile of boxes. Stooping over them was the angular figure of
Nichols, the second mate. He looked up at me, screwing his yellow eyes
together.

"Going ashore," he asked, "'long of that Puffing Billy?"

"What business is it of yours'" I mumbled sulkily.

Sudden and intense threatening came into his yellow eyes:

"Don't you ever come to you know where," he said; "I don't want no spies
on what I do. There's a man there'll crack your little backbone if he
catches you. Don't yeh come now. Never."

PART SECOND -- THE GIRL WITH THE LIZARD

CHAPTER ONE

"Rio Medio?" Senor Ramon said to me nearly two years afterwards. "The
_caballero_ is pleased to give me credit for a very great knowledge.
What should I know of that town? There are doubtless good men there and
very wicked, as in other towns. Who knows? Your worship must ask the
boats' crews that the admiral has sent to burn the town. They will be
back very soon now."

He looked at me, inscrutably and attentively, through his gold
spectacles.

It was on the arcade before his store in Spanish Town. Long sunblinds
flapped slightly. Before the next door a large sign proclaimed
"Office of the _Buchatoro Journal_" It was, as I have said, after two
years--years which, as Carlos had predicted, I had found to be of hard
work, and long, hot sameness. I had come down from Horton Pen to Spanish
Town, expecting a letter from Veronica, and, the stage not being in,
had dropped in to chat with Ramon over a consignment of Yankee notions,
which he was prepared to sell at an extravagantly cheap price. It was
just at the time when Admiral Rowley was understood to be going to make
an energetic attempt upon the pirates who still infested the Gulf of
Mexico and nearly ruined the Jamaica trade of those days. Naturally
enough, we had talked of the mysterious town in which the pirates were
supposed to have their headquarters.

"I know no more than others," Ramon said, "save, senor, that I lose
much more because my dealings are much greater. But I do not even know
whether those who take my goods are pirates, as you English say, or
Mexican privateers, as the Havana authorities say. I do not very much
care. _Basta_, what I know is that every week some ship with a letter
of marque steals one of my consignments, and I lose