and listening to the
stories of their captains.

Among the sailors on the fishing-smacks were many unfamiliar and
wild-looking Cuban and Spanish types--men with hard, dark faces, lighted
up by fierce, brilliant black eyes, who looked as if they would have
been in their proper sphere fighting under a black flag, on the Spanish
Main, in the good old days of the bucaneers. But hard and fierce as many
of them looked, they were not wholly insensible to kindness. On the
schooner _Power of God_, where there seemed to be more wild, cruel,
piratical types than on any other vessel except, perhaps, _St. James the
Apostle_, I noticed a sailor with a stern, hard, almost black face and
fierce, dark eyes, who--had such a thing been possible--might have
stepped, just as he stood, out of the pages of "Amyas Leigh." He was
regarding me with an expression in which, if there was no actual
malevolence, there was at least not the slightest indication of
friendliness or good will. Taking from my haversack a box of the
cigarettes with which I had provided myself in anticipation of a tobacco
famine among the Spanish sailors, I sprang over the bulwark, and, with
as cordial a smile of comradeship as I could give him, I placed it in
his hand. For an instant he stared at it as if stupefied with amazement.
Then his hard, set face relaxed a little, and, throwing his head forward
and raising his fierce black eyes to mine, he gave me a long look of
surprise and intense, passionate gratitude, which seemed to say, "I
don't know your language, and I can't _tell_ you how grateful I am, but
I can _look_ it"--and he did. He had evidently been out of tobacco many
days, and in a moment he went below where he could light a match out of
the wind, and presently reappeared, breathing smoke and exhaling it
through his nostrils with infinite satisfaction and pleasure.

Nearly all the sailors on the fishing-smacks were barefooted, many were
bareheaded, and all had been tanned a dark mahogany color by weeks of
exposure to the rays of a tropical sun. Their dress consisted,
generally, of a shirt and a pair of loose trousers of coarse gray
cotton, like the dress worn in summer by Siberian convicts. Dr. Egan
prescribed and furnished medicines for the sick wherever they were
found, and on one vessel performed a rather difficult and delicate
surgical operation for the relief of a man who was suffering from a
badly swollen neck, with necrosis of the lower jawbone.

At ha