“No and I assume you are being magnanimous or you would have heaved me into the sea and that would have been that.”

He tried to smile at her and she could see that he was striving at the same time to hide the pain.

She reached out and touched the bell.

“What are you doing?” he asked suspiciously.

“Ringing for Evans. He is the Steward who has been looking after you – but it was Captain Maclean who cleaned the wound in your shoulder and stitched up your forehead.”

“Captain Maclean?” El Diablo repeated. “I seem to know the name.”

“You ought to – you had a letter forged to him purporting to come from me!”

“Yes, I remember now.”

He was making an almost superhuman effort, Skye could see, to talk against the throbbing ache of his wounds.

When Evans came hurrying into the room, she said,

“El Cabeza is awake and in pain. Will you ask Captain Maclean to give him some morphia or whatever he gave him before?”

“I have some tablets here,” Evans answered.

He took a little box from the drawer at the side of the bed.

“I’m all right,” El Diablo protested, but he swallowed the tablets nevertheless and drank the water that Evans held to his lips.

Then drowsily his eyelids began to fall.

“That’s better,” he said, “much better. Good night – Ice Maiden.”

His voice died away on the last word, but Skye heard what he said. If he only knew, she thought, that the spring thaws had come and her veins were no longer filled with ice.

“Go back to bed, miss,” Evans insisted, “I feel happier if I stay here, and if he’s quiet I’ll doze beside him.”

He was so insistent that Skye obeyed him and, going back to her cabin, fell into a dreamless slumber.

She woke early and went on deck.

“I have wirelessed to the Harbour Master to have a surgeon waiting when we arrive,” Captain Maclean told her.

“That’s splendid,” Skye said.

“Do you want the gentleman taken into hospital?”

“No, of course not.” Skye’s reply was instantaneous.

She had not, for one moment, anticipated that El Diablo might be taken away from her.

“I thought perhaps the doctor might consider he would get treatment more easily that way.”

“I cannot help that. He must stay aboard. There is room for a nurse if the doctor wants him to have one – but the moment be is well enough, we have to take him back to Jācara.”

“Very good, Miss Standish.”

Captain Maclean never asked questions, neither did he talk more than necessary. Skye was grateful for his reticence.

Somehow she could not bear to have to explain anything at the moment.

She walked restlessly up and down the deck.

El Diablo was still asleep for she had looked in when she got up and again after she had finished breakfast.