sight from the time
they had left the river, and it did not need the compass to show
them which way they should steer. There were many fishing boats
from Nivelle, Urumia, and Saint Sebastian to be seen, dotted over
the sea on their left. They kept farther out than the majority of
these, and did not pass any of them nearer than half a mile.

After steering for a couple of hours, Terence relinquished the oar
to his companion.

"You must get accustomed to it, as well as I," he said, "for we
must take it in turns, at night."

By twelve o'clock they were abreast of a town; which was, they had
no doubt, San Sebastian. They were now some four miles from the
Spanish coast. They were travelling at about the same rate as that
at which they had started, but the wind came off the high land, and
sometimes in such strong puffs that they had to loosen the sheet.
The fisherman had shown them how to shorten sail by tying down the
reef points and shifting the tack and, in the afternoon, the
squalls came so heavily that they thought it best to lower the sail
and reef it. Towards nightfall the wind had risen so much that they
made for the land, and when darkness came on threw out the little
grapnel the boat carried, a hundred yards or so from the shore, at
a point where no village was visible. Here they were sheltered from
the wind and, spreading out the nets to form a bed, they laid
themselves down in the bottom of the boat, pulling the sail partly
over them.

"This is jolly enough," Ryan said. "It is certainly pleasanter to
lie here and look at the stars than to be shut up in that hiding
place of Jules's."

"It is a great nuisance having to stop, though," Terence replied.
"It is a loss of some forty miles."

"I don't mind how long this lasts," Ryan said cheerfully. "I could
go on for a month at this work, providing the provisions would hold
out."

"I don't much like the look of the weather, Dicky. There were
clouds on the top of some of the hills and, though we can manage
the boat well enough in such weather as we have had today, it will
be a different thing altogether if bad weather sets in. I should
not mind if I could talk Spanish as well as I can Portuguese. Then
we could land fearlessly, if the weather was too bad to hold on.
But you see, the Spanish hate the Portuguese as much as they do the
French; and would, as likely as not, hand us over at once at the
nearest French post."

They slept fairly and, at daybreak, got u