The mulatto went on eating, but grew absent.  His nature, as before observed, was not a courageous one, and it was obvious that his food at last began to stick in his throat.

“It is much the same as if you were sitting there and feeding on yourself,” said Salve, after a longer pause, during which he had watched the other’s lengthening countenance.  “That’s just what it will be, my dear friend, unless—­”

“Unless—?” repeated the mulatto, pricking up his ears.

“Unless you take good care to pass your dinner in here to me every day from this time.  There are only five days more, and I have fasted for nine, while you have been feeding away, so you are getting off cheaply enough.  If the boatswain sees you passing in food to me, you’ll be punished, so you will have to be cautious, and hold up the plate yourself before the opening, that he may think you are eating right in my face.”

These were humiliating terms; and the mulatto made no immediate reply.  He merely sat with his woolly head bent down in a thoughtful attitude.  But the next day he stationed his broad person with the plate in his hand up in front of the opening, and Salve mercilessly took every morsel there was on it.

It was a matter of the last importance to him not to be reduced in strength, as he knew his life was in his own hands; and that he was anything but taken down, and was as ready as ever for a fight, he showed, when he came out, in a sanguinary encounter which he engaged in gratuitously for Federigo with one of the Americans, and in which it would otherwise undoubtedly have gone hard with the Brazilian.

It was not out of any respect for him that Salve took his part.  He looked upon him as false, treacherous, and entirely unprincipled; there was nothing he did or said that did not seem pervaded with these characteristics.  But he helped him on the strength of that comradeship which among these reprobates has its inviolable laws; and further than that, there was something akin to a personal friendship existing between them.  Federigo was decidedly interesting.  He could talk more or less on almost every subject, and he was full of theories which he propounded during their watches together, and to which Salve eagerly listened.  There was, he said, among other remarks, and in a superior manner, no such thing as religion, no such being as God.  Such ideas were only for dunderheads, who, moreover, in every country had their own particular form of belief for the clever people and the priests to turn to their own purposes.  In reference to that, he told many stories of the impositions practised by the priests in Brazil; and had many agreeable anecdotes, too, about the beliefs of the wretched little race whose Sun land they were passing at the time.  He pronounced, in a word, for the right of the strongest, and for piastres, women, and freedom as the great objects of existence.  What other god than Salve, he once asked ironically, had prevented the Irishman