was all there was to that. Now all he needed to do was have a talk
with _tio_ Mariano, who was on the inside track down in Algiers, as an
old hand at the business. And like a man who has his mind made up and is
afraid he'll change it if he waits too long, he thought he would go at
once to see that influential personage whom they both could be mighty
proud to call their uncle. They would probably find him--it was around
noon you see--up at the _Carabina_, where he usually went to sit a while
and smoke.

And the two brothers started off in that direction. On walking past the
ox-barn they glanced casually at the tavern-boat, blacker and more
ramshackle every day. _Adios, mare!_ They had caught sight of their
mother's glossy wrinkly face peering over the counter in front of the
opening into the wine store, her head swathed as usual in a white
kerchief like a coif. Some dirty underfed sheep were browsing the marsh
grass near the first houses of the village. From the pools of fresh
water behind the dunes frogs were croaking in monotone, their _garumps_
faintly blending with the murmuring of the surf. Wine-colored nets, the
warps festooned with cork toggles, were spread out on the sand, and
among them some young roosters were pecking about or grooming their
shiny feathers, all agleam with a metallic rainbow luster. Along the
drain from the Gas House a number of women on hands and knees were
scrubbing clothes or washing dishes in a pestilential water that stained
the stones on its edges black. Here was the frame of a new boat about
which some carpenters were pounding, and from a distance the skeleton of
unpainted timber looked like the remains of some prehistoric saurian.
Across the drain, some rope-walkers, hanks of hemp about their waists,
were backing away from the lathe, letting the yellow strands revolve
between their deft fingers. And then the Cabanal, so called from the
miserable cabins there which sheltered the very poorest of all those
toilers of the sea! The streets were as straight and regular as the
buildings were capricious, of every shape and size. The red-brick
sidewalks went joyously up and down at different levels according to the
height of the door sills on the huts. The roads were sloughs of mud,
with deep ruts, and puddles from rain that had fallen weeks before. Two
rows of dwarf olive trees brushed the heads of passersby with their
dusty branches, and ropes were stretched from trunk to trunk to serve as
clo