oing to die!..."

He wanted to run to the galley in search of cotton and bandages. He was
something of a quack doctor and always kept things necessary for such
cases.

Ulysses stopped him. He would accept his services, but he wished
something more.

"I want to eat, Uncle Caragol," he said gayly. "I shall be content with
whatever you have.... Fright has given me an appetite."

CHAPTER XI

"FAREWELL, I AM GOING TO DIE"

When Ferragut left Barcelona the wound in his shoulder was already
nearly healed. The rotund negative given by the captain and his pilot
to the questions of the Carabineers freed them from further annoyance.
They "knew nothing,--had seen nothing." The captain received with
feigned indifference the news that the dead body of a man had been
found that very night,--a man who appeared to be a German, but without
papers, without anything that assured his identification,--on a dock
some distance from the berth occupied by the _Mare Nostrum_. The
authorities had not considered it worth while to investigate further,
classifying it as a simple struggle among refugees.

Provisioning the troops of the Orient obliged Ferragut, in the months
following, to sail as part of a convoy. A cipher dispatch would
sometimes summon him to Marseilles, at others to an Atlantic
port,--Saint-Nazaire, Quiberon, or Brest.

Every few days ships of different class and nationality were arriving.
There were those that displayed their aristocratic origin by the fine
line of the prow, the slenderness of the smokestacks and the still
white color of their upper decks: they were like the high-priced steeds
that war had transformed into simple beasts of battle. Former
mail-packets, swift racers of the waves, had descended to the humble
service of transport boats. Others, black and dirty, with the pitchy
plaster of hasty reparation and a consumptive smokestack on an enormous
hull, plowed along, coughing smoke, spitting ashes, panting with the
jangle of old iron. The flags of the Allies and those of the neutral
navies waved on the different ships. Reuniting, they formed a convoy in
the broad bay. There were fifteen or twenty steamers, sometimes thirty,
which had to navigate together, adjusting their different speeds to a
common pace. The cargo boats, merchant steamers that made only a few
knots an hour, exacted a desperate slowness of the rest of the convoy.

The _Mare Nostrum_ had to sail at half speed, making its captain very
i