"That's just what it will be, my dear friend, unless--" "Unless-- ?" repeated the mulatto, pricking up his ears.
"Unless you take good care to pass your dinner in here to me every day from this time.

There are only five days more, and I have fasted for nine, while you have been feeding away, so you are getting off cheaply enough.

If the boatswain sees you passing in food to me, you'll be punished, so you will have to be cautious, and hold up the plate yourself before the opening, that he may think you are eating right in my face." These were humiliating terms; and the mulatto made no immediate reply.
He merely sat with his woolly head bent down in a thoughtful attitude.
But the next day he stationed his broad person with the plate in his hand up in front of the opening, and Salve mercilessly took every morsel there was on it.
It was a matter of the last importance to him not to be reduced in strength, as he knew his life was in his own hands; and that he was anything but taken down, and was as ready as ever for a fight, he showed, when he came out, in a sanguinary encounter which he engaged in gratuitously for Federigo with one of the Americans, and in which it would otherwise undoubtedly have gone hard with the Brazilian.
It was not out of any respect for him that Salve took his part.

He looked upon him as false, treacherous, and entirely unprincipled; there was nothing he did or said that did not seem pervaded with these characteristics.

But he helped him on the strength of that comradeship which among these reprobates has its inviolable laws; and further than that, there was something akin to a personal friendship existing between them.