That Don Diego was not playing fair it was impossible to suspect.  Moreover, there was no conceivable reason why he should not.  And he had been of the utmost frankness with them.  He had denounced their mistake in sailing before the wind upon leaving Barbados.  They should have left the island to leeward, heading into the Caribbean and away from the archipelago.  As it was, they would now be forced to pass through this archipelago again so as to make Curacao, and this passage was not to be accomplished without some measure of risk to themselves.  At any point between the islands they might come upon an equal or superior craft; whether she were Spanish or English would be equally bad for them, and being undermanned they were in no case to fight.  To lessen this risk as far as possible, Don Diego directed at first a southerly and then a westerly course; and so, taking a line midway between the islands of Tobago and Grenada, they won safely through the danger-zone and came into the comparative security of the Caribbean Sea.

“If this wind holds,” he told them that night at supper, after he had announced to them their position, “we should reach Curacao inside three days.”

For three days the wind held, indeed it freshened a little on the second, and yet when the third night descended upon them they had still made no landfall.  The Cinco Llagas was ploughing through a sea contained on every side by the blue bowl of heaven.  Captain Blood uneasily mentioned it to Don Diego.

“It will be for to-morrow morning,” he was answered with calm conviction.

“By all the saints, it is always ‘to-morrow morning’ with you Spaniards; and to-morrow never comes, my friend.”

“But this to-morrow is coming, rest assured.  However early you may be astir, you shall see land ahead, Don Pedro.”

Captain Blood passed on, content, and went to visit Jerry Pitt, his patient, to whose condition Don Diego owed his chance of life.  For twenty-four hours now the fever had left the sufferer, and under Peter Blood’s dressings, his lacerated back was beginning to heal satisfactorily.  So far, indeed, was he recovered that he complained of his confinement, of the heat in his cabin.  To indulge him Captain Blood consented that he should take the air on deck, and so, as the last of the daylight was fading from the sky, Jeremy Pitt came forth upon the Captain’s arm.

Seated on the hatch-coamings, the Somersetshire lad gratefully filled his lungs with the cool night air, and professed himself revived thereby.  Then with the seaman’s instinct his eyes wandered to the darkling vault of heaven, spangled already with a myriad golden points of light.  Awhile he scanned it idly, vacantly; then, his attention became sharply fixed.  He looked round and up at Captain Blood, who stood beside him.

“D’ye know anything of astronomy, Peter?” quoth he.

“Astronomy, is it?  Faith, now, I couldn’t tell the Belt of Orion from the Girdle of Venus.”