Jake signified by a gesture that the subject must be dropped. “As I did agree to leave it to you, I can’t object. After all, I expect you meant well.”
CHAPTER XVII
THE BLACK-FUNNEL BOAT
The breeze had fallen and the shining sea was smooth as glass when the launch passed Adexe. Dick, who lounged at the helm, was not going there. Some alterations to a mole along the coast had just been finished, and Stuyvesant had sent him to engage the contractor who had done the concrete work. Jake, who occasionally found his duties irksome, had insisted on coming.
As they crossed the mouth of the inlet, Dick glanced shorewards through his glasses. The whitewashed coal-sheds glistened dazzlingly, and a fringe of snowy surf marked the curve of beach, but outside this a belt of cool, blue water extended to the wharf. The swell surged to and fro among the piles, checkered with purple shadows and laced with threads of foam, but it was the signs of human activity that occupied Dick’s attention. He noticed the cloud of dust that rolled about the mounds of coal upon the wharf and blurred the figures of the toiling peons, and the way the tubs swung up and down from the hatches of an American collier until the rattle of her winches suddenly broke off.
“They seem to be doing a big business,” he remarked. “It looks as if that boat had stopped discharging, but she must have landed a large quantity of coal.”
“There’s pretty good shelter at Adexe,” Jake replied. “In ordinary weather, steamers can come up to the wharf, instead of lying a quarter of a mile off, as they do at Santa Brigida. However, there’s not much cargo shipped, and a captain who wanted his bunkers filled would have to make a special call with little chance of picking up any freight. That must tell against the place.”
They were not steaming fast, and just before a projecting point shut in the inlet the deep blast of a whistle rang across the water and the collier’s dark hull swung out from the wharf. A streak of foam, cut sharply between her black side and the shadowed blue of the sea, marked her load-line, and she floated high, but not as if she were empty.