Directly the boat had been hoisted the ship’s sails were filled on the off-shore tack, and Byrne imparted the whole story to his captain, who was but a very few years older than himself.  There was some amused indignation at it—­but while they laughed they looked gravely at each other.  A Spanish dwarf trying to beguile an officer of his majesty’s navy into stealing a mule for him—­that was too funny, too ridiculous, too incredible.  Those were the exclamations of the captain.  He couldn’t get over the grotesqueness of it.

“Incredible.  That’s just it,” murmured Byrne at last in a significant tone.

They exchanged a long stare.  “It’s as clear as daylight,” affirmed the captain impatiently, because in his heart he was not certain.  And Tom the best seaman in the ship for one, the good-humouredly deferential friend of his boyhood for the other, was becoming endowed with a compelling fascination, like a symbolic figure of loyalty appealing to their feelings and their conscience, so that they could not detach their thoughts from his safety.  Several times they went up on deck, only to look at the coast, as if it could tell them something of his fate.  It stretched away, lengthening in the distance, mute, naked, and savage, veiled now and then by the slanting cold shafts of rain.  The westerly swell rolled its interminable angry lines of foam and big dark clouds flew over the ship in a sinister procession.

“I wish to goodness you had done what your little friend in the yellow hat wanted you to do,” said the commander of the sloop late in the afternoon with visible exasperation.

“Do you, sir?” answered Byrne, bitter with positive anguish.  “I wonder what you would have said afterwards?  Why!  I might have been kicked out of the service for looting a mule from a nation in alliance with His Majesty.  Or I might have been battered to a pulp with flails and pitch-forks—­a pretty tale to get abroad about one of your officers—­while trying to steal a mule.  Or chased ignominiously to the boat—­for you would not have expected me to shoot down unoffending people for the sake of a mangy mule. . .  And yet,” he added in a low voice, “I almost wish myself I had done it.”

Before dark those two young men had worked themselves up into a highly complex psychological state of scornful scepticism and alarmed credulity.  It tormented them exceedingly; and the thought that it would have to last for six days at least, and possibly be prolonged further for an indefinite time, was not to be borne.  The ship was therefore put on the inshore tack at dark.  All through the gusty dark night she went towards the land to look for her man, at times lying over in the heavy puffs, at others rolling idle in the swell, nearly stationary, as if she too had a mind of her own to swing perplexed between cool reason and warm impulse.

Then just at daybreak a boat put off from her and went on tossed by the seas towards the shallow cove where, with considerable difficulty, an officer in a thick coat and a round hat managed to land on a strip of shingle.