Thus it happened that Jack was absent from Boston for two years and returned to find that he had lost that, that all the gold of El Dorado could not replace—the woman whom he loved.
V.
“Mother Sybella, Mother Sybella! May I approach?” yelled every few minutes the man seated on a rock half way up the hill that rose steep from the Port au Prince highway.
The neglected and broken pavement of the road that remained as a monument to the long-departed French governors of Haiti was almost hidden by the rank, luxurious growth of tropical plants on either side of it. As seen from the hillside, where the man was sitting, it seemed an impracticable path for even the slowly moving donkeys which here and there crawled between the overhanging vegetation.
The man looked neither to the right nor to the left, but throwing back his head, at intervals of possibly fifteen minutes, as if addressing the blazing sun above, bawled out at the top of his voice:
“Mother Sybella! Mother Sybella! May I approach?”
The man was a mulatto, though with features markedly of the negro type; around his head he wore a much soiled white handkerchief. His body was fairly bursting out of a tight-fitting blue coat of military fashion, adorned with immense brass buttons. His bare feet and long thin shanks appeared below dirty duck trousers that once had been white.