“The English always pay,” Toni would say.  “But now nobody is paying and the ship isn’t earning anything, and we are spending every day....  About how much are we spending?”

And he and the cook would again calculate in detail the cost of keeping up the steamer, becoming terrified on reaching the total.  One day without moving was costing more than the two men could earn in a month.

“This can’t go on!” Toni would protest.

His indignation took him ashore several times in search of the captain.  He was afraid to speak to him, considering it a lack of discipline to meddle in the management of the boat, so he invented the most absurd pretext in order to run afoul of Ferragut.

He looked with antipathy at the porter of the albergo because he always told him that the captain had just gone out.  This individual with the air of a procurer must be greatly to blame for the immovability of the steamer; his heart told him so.

Because he couldn’t come to blows with the man, and because he could not stand seeing him laugh deceitfully while watching him wait hour after hour in the vestibule, he took up his station in the street, spying on Ferragut’s entrances and exits.

The three times that he did succeed in speaking with the captain, the result was always the same.  The captain was as greatly delighted to see him as if he were an apparition from the past with whom he could communicate the joy of his overflowing happiness.

He would listen to his mate, congratulating himself that all was going so well on the ship, and when Toni, in stuttering tones, would venture to ask the date of departure, Ulysses would hide his uncertainty under a tone of prudence.  He was awaiting a most valuable cargo; the longer they waited for it, the more money they were going to gain....  But his words were not convincing to Toni.  He remembered the captain’s protests fifteen days before over the lack of good cargo in Naples, and his desire to leave without loss of time.

Upon returning aboard, the mate would at once hunt Caragol, and both would comment on the changes in their chief.  Toni had found him an entirely different man, with beard shaved, wearing his best clothes, and displaying in the arrangement of his person a most minute nicety, a decided wish to please.  The rude pilot had even come to believe that he had detected, while talking to him, a certain feminine perfume like that of their blonde visitor.

This news was the most unbelievable of all for Caragol.

“Captain Ferragut perfumed!...  The captain scented!...  The wretch!” And he threw up his arms, his blind eyes seeking the brandy bottles and the oil flasks, in order to make them witnesses of his indignation.

The two men were entirely agreed as to the cause of their despair.  She was to blame for it all; she who was going to hold the boat spellbound in this port until she knew when, with the irresistible power of a witch.