"Confound it," I said, "I shall run away to sea! I tell you, I'm
rotting, rotting! There! I say, Ralph, give me Carlos' direction...." I
caught hold of his arm. "I'll go after him. He'd show me a little life.
He said he would."

Ralph remained lost in a kind of gloomy abstraction, while I went on
worrying him for Carlos' address.

"Carlos is the only soul I know outside five miles from here. Besides,
he's friends in the Indies. That's where I want to go, and he could give
me a cast. You remember what Tomas Castro said. . . ."

Rooksby came to a sudden halt, and began furiously to switch his corded
legs.

"Curse Carlos, and his Castro, too. They'll have me in jail betwixt
them. They're both in my red barn, if you want their direction. . . ."

He hurried on suddenly up the hill, leaving me gazing upwards at him.
When I caught him up he was swearing--as one did in those days--and
stamping his foot in the middle of the road.

"I tell you," he said violently, "it's the most accursed business! That
Castro, with his Cuba, is nothing but a blasted buccaneer... and Carlos
is no better. They go to Liverpool for a passage to Jamaica, and see
what comes of it!"

It seems that on Liverpool docks, in the owl-light, they fell in with an
elderly hunks just returned from West Indies, who asks the time at the