Ulysses, who was pacing the bridge, received the news with indifference.  “War?...  What war is that?...”  But upon learning that Germany and Austria had begun hostilities with France and Russia, and that England was just intervening in behalf of Belgium, the captain began quickly to calculate the political consequences of this conflagration.  He could see nothing else.

Toni, less disinterested, spoke of the future of the vessel....  Their misery was at last at an end!  Freightage at thirteen shillings a ton was going to be henceforth but a disgraceful memory.  They would no longer have to plead for freight from port to port as though begging alms.  Now they were on the point of achieving importance, and were going to find themselves solicited by consignors and disdainful merchants.  The Mare Nostrum was going to be worth its weight in gold.

Such predictions, though Ferragut refused to accept them, began to be fulfilled in a very short time.  Ships on the ocean routes suddenly became very scarce.  Some of them were taking refuge in the nearest neutral ports, fearing the enemy’s cruisers.  The greater part were mobilized by their governments for the enormous transportation of material that modern war exacts.  The German corsairs, craftily taking advantage of the situation, were increasing with their captures the panic of the merchant marine.

The price of freight leaped from thirteen shillings a ton to fifty, then to seventy, and a few days later to a hundred.  It couldn’t climb any further, according to Captain Ferragut.

“It will climb higher yet,” affirmed the first officer with cruel joy.  “We shall see tonnage at a hundred and fifty, at two hundred....  We are going to become rich!...”

And Toni always used the plural in speaking of the future riches without its ever occurring to him to ask his captain a penny more than the forty-five dollars that he was receiving each month.  Ferragut’s fortune and that of the ship, he invariably looked upon as his own, considering himself lucky if he was not out of tobacco, and could send his entire wages home to his wife and children living down there in the Marina.

His ambition was that of all modest sailors—­to buy a plot of land and become an agriculturist in his old age.  The Basque pilots used to dream of prairies and apple orchards, a little cottage on a peak and many cows.  He pictured to himself a vineyard on the coast, a little white dwelling with an arbor under whose shade he could smoke his pipe while all his family, children and grandchildren, were spreading out the harvest of raisins on the frame-hurdles.

A familiar admiration like that of an ancient squire for his paladin, or of an old subaltern for a superior officer, bound him to Ferragut.  The books that filled the captain’s stateroom recalled his agonies upon being examined in Cartagena for his license as a pilot.  The grave gentlemen of the tribunal had made him turn pale and stutter like a child before the logarithms and formulas of trigonometry.  But just let them consult him on practical matters and his skill as master of a bark habituated to all the dangers of the sea, and he would reply with the self-possession of a sage!