t will be, my
dear friend, unless--"

"Unless--?" repeated the mulatto, pricking up his ears.

"Unless you take good care to pass your dinner in here to me every day
from this time. There are only five days more, and I have fasted for
nine, while you have been feeding away, so you are getting off cheaply
enough. If the boatswain sees you passing in food to me, you'll be
punished, so you will have to be cautious, and hold up the plate
yourself before the opening, that he may think you are eating right in
my face."

These were humiliating terms; and the mulatto made no immediate reply.
He merely sat with his woolly head bent down in a thoughtful attitude.
But the next day he stationed his broad person with the plate in his
hand up in front of the opening, and Salve mercilessly took every morsel
there was on it.

It was a matter of the last importance to him not to be reduced in
strength, as he knew his life was in his own hands; and that he was
anything but taken down, and was as ready as ever for a fight, he
showed, when he came out, in a sanguinary encounter which he engaged in
gratuitously for Federigo with one of the Americans, and in which it
would otherwise undoubtedly have gone hard with the Brazilian.

It was not out of any respect for him that Salve took his part. He
looked upon him as false, treacherous, and entirely unprincipled; there
was nothing he did or said that did not seem pervaded with these
characteristics. But he helped him on the strength of that comradeship
which among these reprobates has its inviolable laws; and further than
that, there was something akin to a personal friendship existing between
them. Federigo was decidedly interesting. He could talk more or less on
almost every subject, and he was full of theories which he propounded
during their watches together, and to which Salve eagerly listened.
There was, he said, among other remarks, and in a superior manner, no
such thing as religion, no such being as God. Such ideas were only for
dunderheads, who, moreover, in every country had their own particular
form of belief for the clever people and the priests to turn to their
own purposes. In reference to that, he told many stories of the
impositions practised by the priests in Brazil; and had many agreeable
anecdotes, too, about the beliefs of the wretched little race whose Sun
land they were passing at the time. He pronounced, in a word, for the
right of the strongest, and for piastres,