Mr. Harman concurred.
“I’ve been done there myself,” said he, “by chaps that hadn’t cents in their pockets, let alone dollars. Skinned alive I was of every buck to my name in a faro joint at Cubra, and me winning all the time. Hadn’t got half-way down the street to my ship with a pocket full of silver dollars when I put my hand in my pocket and found nothing but stones, filled me up they had with pebbles off the beach, playin’ guitars all the time and smokin’ cigarettes and pretendin’ to hasty-manyana.
“Well, I’m not against landin’ this hooker on them, but I tell you, Bud, it’s my experience, before we comes to close grips with them we’ll be wantin’ to fix our skins on with seccotine.”
“You leave them to me,” said Bud Davis.
“I’ve known the insides and outsides of Chinks,” went on the other, “and I’ve had dealin’s with Greeks up Susun way, oyster boat Levantines will take your back teeth whiles you’re tellin’ them you don’t want buyin’ their dud pearls, but these chaps are in their own class. Jim Satan, that’s what they are, and there’s not a ’Frisco Jew sellin’ dollar watches can walk round the brim of their sombreros.”
“You leave them to me,” said Bud, and the Araya snored on.
On and on with a gentle roll over the wind-speckled blue of the endless swell, lifting nothing but ocean, and over ocean vast dawns that turned to torrid noons and died in sunsets like the blaze of burning worlds; till one morning the cry of the Kanaka look-out answered the cry of a great gull flying with them and there before them stood the coast boiling where the sun was breaking above it and stretching to north and south of the sun blaze, solid, remote, in delicately pencilled hills dying from sight in the blue distance. Davis, who knew the coast, altered the helm. They were forty miles or so to the north of their right position, and it was not till afternoon that the harbour of Buenodiaz lay before them with the flame trees showing amidst the flat-topped houses and the blue water lapping the deserted mole. The quay by the mole was deserted and La Plazza, the public square, distinctly to be seen from the sea, lifted slightly as it was by the upward trend of the ground, was empty. Through the glass the houses showed, their green shutters tightly shut and not a soul on the verandas.
It was almost as though some Pelée had erupted and covered the place with the lava of pure desolation clear as glass.
“Taking their siestas,” said Davis. “Keep her as she goes. I know this harbour and it’s all good holding ground, beyond that buoy.”
Harman at the wheel nodded, and Davis went forward to superintend the fellows getting the anchor ready while the Araya, her canvas quivering to the last of the dying breeze, stole in past an old rusty torpedo boat, past a grain ship that seemed dead, on and on, dropping her anchor at least two cable lengths from the mole.