Gaspard, leaning on the taffrail, watched Martinique dwindling in the sun-blaze and sea-dazzle. Dominica, to eastward, stood vague, and ghostly on the horizon; to westward the sea showed nothing but the purple of an infinite pansy, an ocean of St. Estèphe or Macon blazed upon by the fiercest light of the tropics.

Sagesse was standing by the negro who was at the wheel, and La Belle Arlésienne was heading nor’ nor’-west on a course that would take her to westward of St. Kitts and past the Virgin Islands. Here Sagesse would steer a west-nor’-west course. It would be a quicker passage than in coming, for they had now with them the South Equatorial current.

Gaspard, as he turned from the taffrail, heard Sagesse give an order for the hands to man the lee braces. They were beyond the shelter of the island now, and the steady blow of the trades was bending La Belle Arlésienne over gently, as though a great hand were playing with her. “Now I will capsize you,” would sigh the voice to which the hand belonged, speaking with a deep hum through the taut, twanging rigging, whilst La Belle would bend like an old coquette to the gentle pressure, till, with a groan of the rudder and a dash of sparkling spray, she would remember herself and come to a more even keel.

Gaspard had noticed the number of the crew when he203 came on board; besides Sagesse and Jules there were ten hands, all negroes, large, well set-up men, well fitted for the arduous work before them, with the exception of one, an undersized, shifty-eyed and depressed-looking individual from Porto Rico.

“Ten,” said Gaspard to himself, as he counted them. “With Sagesse and Jules that makes twelve, and with me thirteen. Thirteen, and we start on a Friday, and we expect luck!”

“Regardez,” said Sagesse, ranging up beside him and indicating the crew. “They are not a bad lot; all but that Porto Rican—he is new to me and does not know our ways. We will make a better man of him before the voyage is over. Look how Jules handles them.”

After Sagesse, Jules was the ruling spirit on board the barquentine. He had never to repeat an order, and he was a man much more after Gaspard’s heart than Sagesse; yet he was tainted by Sagesse and, most evidently his slave.

There was only one other person beside Gaspard on board who did not bend entirely to the eye of the redoubtable Captain, and that was the Porto Rican. This individual obeyed orders in a surly manner, and Sagesse watched him with a brooding eye.

“We will make a better man of him before the voyage is over,” said he again, as he turned from the hands who were being dismissed, and stood for a moment looking to windward at the blue ghost of Dominica.

Gaspard said nothing.

He did not even remark on the unlucky number of the crew. He had imbibed the teaching of M. Seguin with regard to Sagesse, and he felt that in this voyage, so filled as it was with the possibilities of wealth, things might happen of a disastrous nature, and that silence and watchfulness204 were essential. He did not in the least know that Sagesse, under the delusion that his plans had been betrayed to M. Seguin, had sworn to be even with him (Gaspard). He knew nothing of this, but something warned him to be silent, civil as possible to this extraordinary man, and on the look-out. On that day, in fact, began a duel of intelligence between these two men, the ending of which none could forecast from the nature of the men themselves.

The expedition had been so rushed that Sagesse felt dissatisfied in his mind as to the stowage and condition of some of the most important gear. The diving-dresses, pumps, tubes and boring instruments were accordingly brought on deck after dinner from the lockers where they had been stowed.

Sagesse, who knew a little of everything, and whose natural genius and commonsense supplied most deficiencies in his knowledge, had the pump taken to pieces and each piece greased thick and wrapped in canvas; the metal parts of the diving-dresses were treated with the same care, only in a different manner; the dresses themselves, the air tubes, the whole gear down to the least detail came bit by bit under his careful inspection and received as much attention as possible to protect it from the influence of the sea air and the tropical rot that touches all things from metal to morals.

At eight bells (four o’clock) Gaspard, who had retired to his bunk for a doze, was awakened by a cry from the deck. He had left the door of his cabin wide open and the deck-house door being also open, he could see the white, sunlit deck, the figure of Sagesse, the figures of several of the crew and something lying on the deck before Sagesse. He tumbled out of his bunk and came through the deck-house into the sunlight.

205 Sagesse was holding a belaying-pin in his hand, and the thing on the deck before him was the Porto Rican, Pedro.

The man was covered with blood from a wound in the forehead. He w............