ppear. Where could they be ... _ay Dios, Dios!_
Happy the women who had their sons and husbands safe in their arms!
Other boys were out in that tumbling hell, driving through the night in
a floating coffin, tossing from white cap to white cap, dizzily plunging
into the yawning trough, while decks groaned beneath their feet, and
gray hills of water curled above to break down upon them in a destroying
surge!

It rained all night long. Many women waited out till sunrise, drawing
their soaked cloaks about their shivering bodies, kneeling in the black
mud and coal-dust on the Breakwater, shrieking their prayers to be sure
that God would hear, or, again, in desperate rage, stopping to tear
their hair and hurl the most frightful blasphemies of the Fishmarket up
toward heaven.

And when dawn came, what a glorious dawn it was! As if nothing at all
had happened, the sun lifted a smiling hypocritical face above the line
of a clean horizon, and spread a broad uneasy glitter of golden beauty
over waters that peacefully carried long streaks of foam from the
night's turmoil. The first thing that the rays of morning gilded was the
battered hulk of a Norwegian barkentine ashore off the Beach of Nazaret,
its nose buried in the sand, its midships awash, its bilges agape and in
splinters, while strips of canvas floated from the rigging tangled about
the broken masts.

The ship had carried a cargo of Northern lumber. Pushed gently along by
the lapping waves, timbers and boards were slowly drifting ashore, where
they were dragged out by swarms of black ants and disappeared as though
sunk in the sand. And they worked hard, those ants. The storm was just
what they had been waiting for. Beach-pirates were whipping up their
horses gayly along all the roads leading to the _huerta_ of Ruzafa.
Boards like that would make such fine houses! And the booty was all
theirs by rights! What did it matter if a girder were stained, perhaps,
with the blood of one of those poor foreigners lying dead back there
upon the shore?

Groups of idlers were gathered, with a few policemen, around some
corpses that were stretched out on the beach some distance from the
water. Strong, handsome fellows they had been, light-haired all; and
bits of white skin, soft and smooth, though muscular, could be seen
through the rents in their garments, while their blue eyes, glassy and
staring in death, looked up at the sky with a mysterious fixity.

The Norwegian had been the