"FAREWELL, I AM GOING TO DIE" When Ferragut left Barcelona the wound in his shoulder was already nearly healed.

The rotund negative given by the captain and his pilot to the questions of the Carabineers freed them from further annoyance.
They "knew nothing,--had seen nothing." The captain received with feigned indifference the news that the dead body of a man had been found that very night,--a man who appeared to be a German, but without papers, without anything that assured his identification,--on a dock some distance from the berth occupied by the _Mare Nostrum_.

The authorities had not considered it worth while to investigate further, classifying it as a simple struggle among refugees.
Provisioning the troops of the Orient obliged Ferragut, in the months following, to sail as part of a convoy.

A cipher dispatch would sometimes summon him to Marseilles, at others to an Atlantic port,--Saint-Nazaire, Quiberon, or Brest.
Every few days ships of different class and nationality were arriving.
There were those that displayed their aristocratic origin by the fine line of the prow, the slenderness of the smokestacks and the still white color of their upper decks: they were like the high-priced steeds that war had transformed into simple beasts of battle.

Former mail-packets, swift racers of the waves, had descended to the humble service of transport boats.