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Pascualo smiled bitterly! What the devil did he care! Certainly, haul her in when you please! The crew began pulling at the cable that stretched from the lower edge of the net to either boat, and they pulled and pulled joyously. In spite of the wet weather and the back-breaking exertion, Tonet and the sailors were in great glee. This was something like a haul! A hundredweight at every foot!
Now the Rector understood that there were two Rectors under that one hide of his. One of them was the usual man he had always been good-natured, taciturn, with kindly feelings for everybody. The other, a beast that began to roar and claw inside him at the thought of being deceived, and which snarled for blood in the presence of betrayal. And Pascualo laughed a shrill high-strung laugh! Pardon!
She was on the lookout for early customers, and a bottle of brandy with glasses was out on the board. Siñá Tona was still asleep in her stateroom. Knowing hardly what he was about, Pascualo turned in that direction, and did not stop till his elbow was on the counter. "Give us a glass!"
Left to himself, Pascualo began to walk up and down the beach, his hands stuffed into his sash, and the legs of his oilskins rasping noisily as they rubbed together. The shore was quite dark. Here and there a stove could be seen glowing on the deck of some boat, blinking as the figure of a sailor passed in front of it.
Pascualo cried. "I must speak, at last, tell you what I think of you, in just two words! You thought you had fooled me! But it was you I chased last night through the streets of the village. You had been with that foul woman ashore there! I am not going to kill you, because we're going to die together. But this boy here I used to call him my Pascualet is not to blame.
Well, even the 'cats' and the sailors on the beach, when they want to say that a man's wife is deceiving him, call him a worse lanudo than the Rector." "Damn your soul!" Pascualo roared, clenching his fist and shaking it in Rosario's face. "Rosario ... Look, Rosario, be careful what you say.
Pascualo could not make out the lines of the craft as she sped past; but he knew it was the cutter, which had tired of loafing off the Cabañal, and was boldly running for the Columbretas to catch the smugglers in their refuge before the storm cleared. For the first time since leaving the pool that afternoon, the Rector let go the tiller for a second.
Pascualo was at last on the road to money, and he, well, at least, he could see his way through the summer. The good-natured Rector kept reflecting to himself on what an unselfish fellow his brother was, and almost felt like hugging him. Yes, that boy's heart was in the right place! Fond as could be of him and of Dolores, and he loved little Pascualet as though the baby were his own child!
The mother, sometimes, on suddenly waking from a doze behind the counter and finding Pascualet in front of her, would start with violent surprise. Pascualo, for all the world! Just as she had known him as a boy, before their marriage, when he was "cat" on a fishing vessel!
We are both fools, Pascualo!" The Rector had closed the door behind him, and was standing now in front of his sister-in-law, his arms folded, looking at her with a scowl of angry hostility, the instinctive hatred a man feels toward the one who wrecks his dream. "The truth, now! The truth! Speak out! All you've got to say!"
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