The gaunt Spaniard commanding my presence stood waiting, hardly more than five paces from where I landed, yet so intense became my immediate interest in the strange scene—­an interest partly real, but largely simulated for the occasion—­that he contented himself watching my confused antics with much apparent amusement, and without addressing me.  Even to this hour that scene lies distinct before my eyes.  Possessed I skill with pencil I could sketch each small detail from the retina of memory—­the solitary sentinel beside the rail, his well-worn uniform of blue and white dingy in the sun; another farther forward, where a great opening yawned; with yet a third, standing rigid before a closed door of the after cabin.  An officer, his coat richly decorated with gold braid, wearing epaulets, and having a short sword dangling at his side, paced back and forth across the top of a little house near the stern.  I heard him utter some command to a sailor near the wheel, but he never so much as glanced toward me.  Perhaps thirty or more seamen, bronzed of face, and oddly bedecked as to hair, lounged idly amid the shadows opposite, while, more closely at hand, that gaunt, cadaverous Spaniard, at whose invitation I was present, leaned against a big gun, puffing nonchalantly at a cigarette, held between lean, saffron-colored fingers.  The deck was white as the snows of a northern Winter, while the brass work along the railings and about the cannon glittered brilliantly in the sunshine.  There was a gaudy yellow-and-white striped canopy stretched above a portion of the deck aft; the huge masts seemed to pierce into the blue of the skies; while on every side were ranged grim guns of brass and iron.

My role was that of an ignorant, green, half-frightened darky, and I presume I both appeared and acted the natural-born idiot, if I might judge from the expression upon the Spaniard’s face, and the broad grin lighting up the fierce countenance of the sentry at the gangway.  Yet back of this mask there was grim determination and fixed purpose, so that no article of furniture was along that broad deck which I did not mentally photograph, so as to know its whereabouts if ever I chanced that way again.  Ay! even to a little cuddy door beside the cookhouse, apparently opening directly into the mysterious regions below, and a great chest lashed hard against the rail, within which I distinguished the bright colors of numerous flags.  I noticed also the odd manner in which queer rope ladders led up from either side of the broad deck to the vast spars high above, rising tier on tier until my head grew dazed with gazing at them.

“Vel, Sambo, my black fellow,” grinned the officer, whose eyes were still lazily following my erratic movements as I peered innocently into the muzzle of a brass carronade in apparent hope of discovering the ball, “zis vus ze first time you vus ever on ze war-sheep, I sink likely.  How you like stop here, hey, an’ fight wis dos sings?” And he rested his yellow hand caressingly upon the breech of the gun.