Presently he thought something moved nigh the chains.  He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard.  Groves of rigging were about the chains; and there, peering from behind a great stay, like an Indian from behind a hemlock, a Spanish sailor, a marlingspike in his hand, was seen, who made what seemed an imperfect gesture towards the balcony, but immediately as if alarmed by some advancing step along the deck within, vanished into the recesses of the hempen forest, like a poacher.

What meant this?  Something the man had sought to communicate, unbeknown to any one, even to his captain.  Did the secret involve aught unfavorable to his captain?  Were those previous misgivings of Captain Delano’s about to be verified?  Or, in his haunted mood at the moment, had some random, unintentional motion of the man, while busy with the stay, as if repairing it, been mistaken for a significant beckoning?

Not unbewildered, again he gazed off for his boat.  But it was temporarily hidden by a rocky spur of the isle.  As with some eagerness he bent forward, watching for the first shooting view of its beak, the balustrade gave way before him like charcoal.  Had he not clutched an outreaching rope he would have fallen into the sea.  The crash, though feeble, and the fall, though hollow, of the rotten fragments, must have been overheard.  He glanced up.  With sober curiosity peering down upon him was one of the old oakum-pickers, slipped from his perch to an outside boom; while below the old negro, and, invisible to him, reconnoitering from a port-hole like a fox from the mouth of its den, crouched the Spanish sailor again.  From something suddenly suggested by the man’s air, the mad idea now darted into Captain Delano’s mind, that Don Benito’s plea of indisposition, in withdrawing below, was but a pretense:  that he was engaged there maturing his plot, of which the sailor, by some means gaining an inkling, had a mind to warn the stranger against; incited, it may be, by gratitude for a kind word on first boarding the ship.  Was it from foreseeing some possible interference like this, that Don Benito had, beforehand, given such a bad character of his sailors, while praising the negroes; though, indeed, the former seemed as docile as the latter the contrary?  The whites, too, by nature, were the shrewder race.  A man with some evil design, would he not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden?  Not unlikely, perhaps.  But if the whites had dark secrets concerning Don Benito, could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks?  But they were too stupid.  Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?  These difficulties recalled former ones.  Lost in their mazes, Captain Delano, who had now regained the deck, was uneasily advancing along it, when he observed a new face; an aged sailor seated cross-legged near the main hatchway.  His skin was shrunk up with wrinkles like a pelican’s empty pouch; his hair frosted; his countenance grave and composed.  His hands were full of ropes, which he was working into a large knot.  Some blacks were about him obligingly dipping the strands for him, here and there, as the exigencies of the operation demanded.