I didn't see how the joke was on them.
“Why, I never knew an Injy islander to dig a cellar,” he says: “They lie on the ground and get ague. Course, they might dig a hole.”
The door of the little house was closed, when we came soft along the muddy shore and crept up to the window. There were five men inside, around a table, leaning forward, whispering together and drinking aguardiente. That's what Kid Sadler on the Hebe Maitland used to call “affectionate water.” They were small men, but fierce-looking and black-eyed, and they appeared as if they were talking state secrets, or each explaining his special brand of crime. Monson roared out and struck the door with his fist, and they disappeared. Three of them went under the table.
Monson had to bend his head to enter, and his shaggy hair pressed along the ceiling. He pulled some by their legs from under the table, and one from a bench in a dark corner by the hair, whom he left suddenly, for it was a woman, and the two others he hauled from a closet.
“Bring us some more!” he shouted in Spanish, laughing uproariously. “Aguardiente! Hoorah!”
I don't know, or forget, how he quieted them, but pretty soon we were seven men about the table, and the woman was serving us with “affectionate water.” One of them, with the woman, was owner of the house, and the others, it seemed, lived across the island. They had heard Monson's laugh, and afterward, hearing and seeing nothing more, they'd taken it to be ghosts and were afraid. They were fierce-looking little men, but pleasant enough and simple-minded. “Doubtless,” they said, “the senores were distinguished persons, who had come on a ship and would buy tobacco.” We arranged that the four, who lived across the island, should come back in the morning with their tobacco. So the four went away affectionate with aguardiente, and we were left alone with the fifth. His name was Pedronez and his wife's Lucina. Then I asked how long they'd lived there.
“One year, six months,” he says, counting on his fingers.
“Build the house?”
“Si, senor. A noble house! A miracle!”
“Ever dig a hole here?”