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Rh blasphemy, at which her master but turned over and snored the more loudly.

And through all these precious minutes, a bottle was tossing on the waves, a bare three hundred feet away.

Roller after roller bore it gently, until with the tide it reached the bare feet of the sleeper, and he awoke.

Don Alfonso nosed it playfully, without any comprehension of its momentous cargo, but Spanish Dick, his curiosity aroused, picked it up and looked at the little roll of bark in side. There seemed to be characters of some sort on it, undecipherable through the brown gloom of the glass.

The strength of his fingers could not turn the improvised cork, so swollen was it, so he called on his clasp-knife, and the message, its long voyage over, was released at last. Now, with all his crazy patchwork vocabulary, the wanderer could read but a few words and these in Spanish, so with a childlike bewilderment he turned the odd scroll this way and that, vainly trying to make it out, then looked from left to right at his companions as if asking for counsel.

But Alfonso, though he looked volumes of intelligence, was quite inarticulate. And Mariuch the parrot, observing her master scratch his head—a familiar gesture, with him expressing mere bewilderment, with the dog a more annoying disturbance—merely cocked one eye, and forcefully predicted that her soul would be lost, a quite unnecessary prophecy when that eye expressed so clearly the Tophet road she had chosen—very early in her young life it must have been. It is a sad perhaps cynical thing to record but Mariuch always made one believe in predestination.