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Updated: June 9, 2025
And Pascualo's face grew paler and paler under its deep sunburn; his eyes were blood-shot as they had been the night before, and he pressed his lips tightly together to hold in the angry words that were tingling on his tongue and gathering in his throat. God, how people must have been laughing at him! Look at the boy! The very same face, the very same ways! Who could mistake them?
But the Rector, pot-bellied numskull that he was, would not listen to reason! The driveling idiot seemed to grow fat on getting people into trouble! And in fact, Pascualo's moon-face was glowing in the excitement of this battle with the sea. At every buffet of the waves he smiled, a purple flush suffusing his features, as though he were rising from a holiday meal.
Tio Pascualo's stranded craft went sailing, wind astern, on a new voyage toward prosperity. Out there on the rocking sea with the old skipper's seines, the boat had never earned so much as now under the widow's charge, though its seams were open and its timbers were rotting away. Evidence of profit could have been found in the successive transformations the old hulk kept undergoing.
That would make her the joke of all the Cabañal. No, siñá Tona had the right idea "Fleet-Foot," the name of old Pascualo's boat, the one he had died in, and that, later on, had been the home of all the family. But now it was the men's turn to shout something down. No, that would bring bad luck, as the fate of Fleet-Foot herself had shown. Dolores had a good one.
Pascualo's wife, Tona, spent more than a week on the Breakwater, a suckling baby in her arms and another child, a chubby little lad, clinging to her skirts. She was sure Pascualo would come home; and every time a fresh detail of the storm was given her, she would tear her hair and renew her screams for the Holy Virgin's help.
He had been hurled through the hatchway by a lunge of the deck before the boat had been lost. Inside there he had lain with his skull crushed. That boat the dream of his life, the achievement of thirty years of penny-saving had proved to be his coffin! Tio Pascualo's widow, in her hysterical weeping, shrank from the repugnant body.
"Remember me to mother!" he said, as he turned down to the beach, leaving his sister to go on alone along the road toward the tavern-boat. But it was late that night before the influence of that disquieting conversation was lifted from Pascualo's mind. Tonet was at home when he arrived, but did not seem at all embarrassed in his presence. All a lie, of course!
On the twelfth day, a revenue cutter came into the port of the Cabañal, towing tio Pascualo's boat behind, bottom-up, blackened, slimy and sticky, floating weirdly like a big coffin and surrounded by schools of fish, unknown to local waters, that seemed bent on getting at a bait they scented through the seams of the wrecked hull. The craft was righted and grounded on the sand.
As the vessel rose to the crests, the keel half out of water aft, the Rector could see other boats from the Cabañal in the distance, vanishing in the mists of the horizon. They were all running with poles virtually bare, scudding before the wind for shelter, though it would be much more dangerous making port than to hold to the open sea. And the claws of remorse sank deep into Pascualo's heart.
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