The slow-spoken Bahaman made no answer.
“Was that your home?” suggested the lad.
Again there was no immediate reply. Then, suddenly, in a whisper, the black said:
“Dat’s fetich. You ain’t gwine dar?”
The boy nodded his head reassuringly. He knew what “fetich” meant—the African’s sign of ill-omen. Alarmed over a fetich! Finally he went forward and asked Mrs. Anderson what she knew about the blacks of the Bahamas.
She told him that they were mostly descended from real Africans; that, in the days when slave stealing was being practised, it was the custom when slavers were caught by English or American men-of-war, to liberate the victims on the tropic Bahamas.
“There may be old men there now,” she said, “who were born in the wilds of Africa. And the second and third generation are not much more civilized. Ba is probably almost as much African as if he were living in the Congo,” she concluded.
“Where is Timbado Key?” asked Andy.
Mrs. Anderson shook her head. “All the Bahama Islands, except Providence, are ‘out islands.’ This must be one of the smaller ‘out islands.’ I never heard of it.”
When the boy returned to the stern he again attempted to learn from Ba why Timbado was fetich, and where it was. But there was only blankness on the boatman’s immobile face. In a short time, Andy was to know a great deal about Timbado Key, but for the time he had to restrain his curiosity.