The small man gave no symptoms of joy at this warm greeting; but, screwing his wiry frame out of the captain’s caresses, his eye flashed like a spark of fire quickly up and down and all around the apartment, as if making a mental inventory of the furniture, and not omitting his tall companion, from the crown of his head to the toes of his straw slippers, when he quietly remarked through his closed teeth,
“Como estamos?”––“How are we?”
“Ah, Don Ignaçio, poco bueno, poco malo! Half and half. Just getting well over that maldito attack of Yellow Jack.”
“Hum! more bad than good. No? I’ve brought you some letters from the agent at Havana.”
“Thanks––thanks, my friend. Ho! Babette! Babette! Some anisette for Don Ignaçio. Presto! my good Baba. There––that will do!” he said, merrily, as the liqueur and glasses were placed on the table. “And don’t omit the turtle-soup for dinner, and tell Lascar Joe to make it. Ah! I forget––the best cook I had––the devil’s making soup of him now. However, do the best you can, my Baba, and let us have dinner about sunset.”
Then turning to his visitor, with a graceful bow and a laugh, he added, “And we’ll have the doctor to join us, and tell how he cut off our poor friend Gibbs’s leg with a hand-saw. Dios! amigo! Capital joke, ’pon my honor!”
Captain Brand’s honor! Lord have mercy upon us! And he had very few jokes, and never told one himself.
“Hum!” replied the Tuerto, in the pause of the conversation. “There’s better jokes than that to hear. Mira! look!”
With this brief rejoinder he threw a bundle of newspapers on the table, and, pulling out a packet of letters from a breast pocket, pitched it toward his host. Then helping himself to a thimbleful of anisette, he took off his narrow-brimmed chip hat for the first time, polished up his eye a bit with the knuckle of his fore finger, and looked at his companion fixedly.
“Letters, I see, from our old friend Moreno, at Havana,” said Captain Brand, as he sat down on the settee, and with a pretty tortoise-shell knife cut round the seals. “Ah! what says he? ‘Happy to inform you,’ is he? ‘Packages of French silks seized by custom-house 65 on account of informal invoice and clearance.’ Why didn’t the fool forge others, then? Well, what next? ‘Schooner “Reel,” from Barbadoes, with cargo of rum and jerked beef, wrecked going into Principe, and crew thrown into prison on suspicion of being engaged in––’ Oh! ah! served them right, when I ordered them to St. Jago––delighted they must be! ‘Bills for advances and stores now due, please remit, per hands of Don Ignaçio Sanchez––’”