"Well," he cried, seeming to exude pleasure, "I will stay with you a while, eh? Maybe we can teach him something—this cut-upping Tommy of yours!"
He had fallen in with our scheme most agreeably, and later Tommy confided to me that he was glad we wouldn't have to sit on the old fellow's head.
Passing that afternoon beneath Morro Castle, the Whim tacked prettily through the entrance of Havana harbor and in another scant two miles dropped anchor.
Havana Bay is a dancing sheet of water, as bright as the skies and hardly less contagious than the city's laughter. But when one drops anchor and then hoists it up, one recoils from the black and slimy mud those blue waves hide; and this circumstance, slight as it may seem, held a potent influence on our future.
Riding nearby was another yacht, in size and design very much like the Whim, except that her rigging had an old-fashioned cut. Her masts were checked with age and, where our craft showed polished brass, she long ago had resorted to white paint. At the same time, she gave the impression of aristocracy—broken-down aristocracy, if you choose. No bunting fluttered at her masthead, no country's emblem waved over her taffrail, and the only hint of nationality or ownership was a rather badly painted word Orchid on her name plate. Taken altogether, she was rather difficult to place.
These signs of poverty would have passed unobserved by us, had we not in coming to anchor swung between her moorings and the Machina wharf. Not that it made any serious difference, Gates explained, nor were we impertinently near, but it just missed being the scrupulously polite thing to have done—and Gates was a stickler on matters of yacht etiquette. So he felt uncomfortable about it, while at the same time being reluctant to hoist anchor and foul our decks with the bottom of Havana Bay. To be on the safe side he determined to megaphone apologies and consult her wishes. Twice he hailed, receiving no answer. Two sailors were seated forward playing cards—a surlier pair of ruffians would have been hard to find—but neither of them so much as glanced up.
"Let the professor try in Spanish," Tommy said.
Monsieur took the megaphone and did so, but with no better success. Then to our profound admiration he called in half a dozen languages; finally growling: "Lascars, likely!"—and proceeded to hail in something he afterwards explained was Lascar gibberish. All of which failed to attract the surly pair who played at cards.
"Now you might try Airedale and Pekinese," Tommy suggested, but this was lost on the serious little man. Yet he did call in another strangely sounding tongue, then with a sigh laid the megaphone down, saying:
"They must be stuffies!"