During the next week Dick had again occasion to visit the harbor, and while he waited on the mole for a boat watched a gang of peons unloading some fertilizer from a barge. It was hard and unpleasant work, for the stuff, which had a rank smell, escaped from the bags and covered the perspiring men. The dust stuck to their hot faces, almost hiding their color; but one, though equally dirty, looked different from the rest, and Dick, noting that he only used his left arm, drew nearer. As he did so, the man walked up the steep plank from the lighter with a bag upon his back and staggering across the mole dropped it with a gasp. His heaving chest and set face showed what the effort had cost, and the smell of the fertilizer hung about his ragged clothes. Dick saw that it was Payne and that the fellow knew him.
“You have got a rough job,” he remarked. “Can’t you find something better?”
“Nope,” said the man grimly. “Do you reckon I’d pack dirt with a crowd like this if I could help it?”
Dick, who glanced at the lighter, where half-naked negroes and mulattos were at work amid a cloud of nauseating dust, understood the social degradation the other felt.
“What’s the matter with your arm?” he asked.
Payne pulled up his torn sleeve and showed an inflamed and half-healed wound.
“That! Got it nipped in a crane-wheel and it doesn’t get much better. Guess this dirt is poisonous. Anyway, it keeps me here. I’ve been trying to make enough to buy a ticket to Jamaica, but can’t work steady. As soon as I’ve put up two or three dollars, I have to quit.”
Dick could understand this. The man looked gaunt and ill and must have been heavily handicapped by his injured arm. He did not seem anxious to excite Dick’s pity, though the latter did not think he cherished much resentment.
“I tried to find you when I got better after being stabbed,” he said. “I don’t quite see why you came to my help.”
Payne grinned sourly. “You certainly hadn’t much of a claim; but you were a white man and that dago meant to kill. Now if I’d held my job with Fuller and you hadn’t dropped on to Oliva’s game, I’d have made my little pile; but I allow you had to fire us when something put you wise.”