Three weeks later we passed Tobago and were looking for Clyde's little island. We dropped anchor there one evening about eight o'clock. The moon was high and the sea bright. It was sixteen years since I'd seen that shore last, the night I rowed old Clyde up the inlet, and we buried his canvas bags. It was hard won enough by the old man, that money, with twenty years' dodging South American customs. We'd buried it in the middle of a triangle of three trees. I remembered how black the sea had been, and rough off shore. I remembered the black cruiser with its pennon of smoke. The inlet had been reedy, and the water there quiet, and the soil we dug in punky and wet.
I sat in the stern of the dingey now and let Monson row, which he did powerfully. His forearm was like a log of wood, the muscles coming out of it in knots. I was glad enough there was no danger to seaward, and wished I could carry Clyde's money away in a check, instead of the meal bags we had in the dingey.
We rowed along and came to the inlet. There was a lot of marsh grass and deep-growing reeds, and clear water between that stretched away inland. It made a straight line between the water reeds leading up to a triangle of three trees. There was a little white house in the middle of the triangle, with two lit windows.
I says: “Monson! Somebody's squatted on it!”
“What!” he says.
Somebody was singing in the house. Monson looked around from his rowing, and found it very funny to his mind, for he laughed with a roar, and the singing stopped short.
“Turn into the reeds!” I says, and we crouched there in the boat.
“It's just where the house is,” I says, “or it was. There wasn't any house then.”
Monson shook with laughter though he kept it quiet, and I don't know what pleased him. It would have pleased me then to see him dead, I was that savage for the people in the house. One spot on a mean little island, and they'd squatted on it! Yet it was plain enough, for the inlet led up to the three trees, which seemed to invite a man to do there whatever he had planned to do.
“Stuff 'em up their chimney,” says Monson. “Tip the hut into the creek. That joke's on them, ain't it?”