Except for the sake of Marc Hislop and one or two others, who in our parting interview had acted as my friends, I hoped--but this was in the intense bitterness of my heart, at an abandonment so cruel--that the longboat might swamp, founder, or perish, how I cared not.
The boat might fall in with some ship, and thus afford me a double chance of being taken off the island. But would the captain of this supposed ship bear up for the land if it lay far from his course?
Amid these perplexing thoughts and surmises, my greatest source of annoyance was the odious companionship of the Cubano.
I felt neither hunger nor sleep, though all the preceding night I had never closed an eye; but now I remained upon the bluff, gazing on the sunlit sea, from under the shadow of a broad-leaved plantain, until I was roused in the afternoon by Antonio, who joined me.
"_Hola! mio muchacho!_" (hallo! my boy), he exclaimed; "you promised me a dozen of biscuits if I released you from my hiding hole in yonder rock. Now, biscuits are biscuits here, so where are those for which I ransomed you?"
"Gone in the boat with every thing else," I replied, sulkily and sternly.
"What shall we do when my powder is done?"
"There are but ten charges left," said he, gloomily, as he opened the tin case.
"What is that to me?" I asked, with growing anger.
"It is this much to you, that if provisions fall short, I shall _eat you_!" he replied, with a fiendish grin, accompanied by an emphatic oath. "Now, my fine fellow, what do you think of _that_?"
The words of the wretch, his herculean frame and ferocious aspect, which the wild life he had lately spent among the woods of Alphonso had not improved, made me shudder.
On remembering the manner in which we first found him floating in the open boat at sea, the suspicions of Weston, Hislop, and Lambourne regarding the disappearance of a companion who had probably been with him--suspicions which all his future conduct seemed to confirm, and knowing all he was capable of committing, my heart sickened with disgust and apprehension; but the imminence of my own danger made me dissemble.
While pretending to smile and to disbelieve him, I mentally considered how to arm myself, or how to deprive him of those weapons which, when added to his muscular strength and singularly brutal nature, rendered him an enemy so formidable.