It was about four o'clock in the afternoon and Kit Askew lounged in a chair on the bridge-deck as the Rio Negro steamed slowly across the long swell of the Caribbean. The wrinkled undulations sparkled with reflected light in a dazzling pattern of blue and silver, and then faded to green and purple in the shadow of the ship. A wave of snowy foam curled up as the bows went down and the throb of the propeller quickened as the poop swung against the sky. Then the lurching hull steadied and the clang of engines resumed its measured beat.
The Rio Negro was old and ugly, with short iron masts from which clumsy derricks hung, tall, upright funnel, and blistered, gray paint. Her boats were dirty and stained by soot, and a belt of rust at her waterline hinted at neglect, but no barnacles and weed marred the smoothness of the plates below. Her antifouling paint was clean, and her lines beneath the swell of quarter and bows were fine. In fact, the Rio Negro was faster than she looked when she carried her regular load of two thousand tons and her under-water body was hidden. She traded in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and at certain ports Customs officials carefully scrutinized her papers. At others, they smiled and allowed her captain privileges that strangers did not get.
Kit wore spotless white clothes, a black-silk belt, and a Panama hat of the expensive kind the Indians weave, holding the fine material under water. A glass occupied a socket in his chair, and when the Rio Negro rolled a lump of ice tinkled against its rim; a box of choice cigars lay on the deck. Kit, however, was not smoking, but drowsily pondered the life he had led for the last three years. He was thinner and looked older than when he left Ashness. He had lost something of his frankness and his raw enthusiasm had gone. His face was quieter and his mouth set in a firm line.
He remembered his surprise when he first met his uncle at a luxurious Florida hotel. Adam Askew wore loose white clothes, a well-cut Tuxedo jacket, a diamond ring, and another big diamond in his scarf. His skin was a curious yellowish brown and his eyes were very black; he rather looked like a Spanish Creole than an Englishman. He had nothing of his brother's quiet manner. Although he was getting old, he walked with a jaunty step; he had a humorous twinkle, and his laugh was careless. In fact, he had an exotic, romantic look that harmonized with Kit's notions of the pirates who once haunted the Gulf of Mexico. When Kit afterwards learned why Adam's friends called him the "buccaneer," he saw that his first impression was not extravagant.
Now he remembered that when they sat behind the imitation Moorish arches on the hotel veranda Adam studied him and laughed.
"You're certainly Peter's son," he remarked. "I can imagine I'd just left him at the end of the Ashness lonning thirty years since. Except that he's got older, I reckon he hasn't changed, and for that matter, Peter was never young. Well, you are surely like him, but if you stop in this country we'll put a move on you."
"If I'm like my father, I am satisfied," Kit rejoined.
Adam's black eyes twinkled. "Now I see a difference; there's red blood in you. But don't take me wrong. Peter's a white man, straight as a plumb-line, one of the best; he's a year the younger of us, but when the old man died he brought me up. There are two kinds of Askews and I belong to the other lot. I don't know why they called you after roystering Kit."
It was obvious that Adam knew the family history, for Christopher Askew was a turbulent Jacobite who lost the most part of his estate when he joined Prince Charlie's starving Highlanders in the rearguard fight at Clifton Moor. Afterwards the sober quietness at Ashness had now and then been disturbed by an Askew who inherited the first Kit's reckless temperament.
Three years had gone since Kit met Adam, and he had learned much. To begin with, Adam sent him to an American business school, and made him study Castilian and French. Then he sent him to Mexico and countries farther south, where he studied human nature of strangely varied kinds. He met and traded with men of many colors: French and Spanish Creoles, negroes, Indians, and half-breeds with some of the blood of all. He knew the American gulf ports and their cosmopolitan hotels and gambling saloons, but Adam noted with half-amused approval that while he was not at all a prig he developed Peter's character and not Kit the Jacobite's. Now they were going south across the Caribbean on a business venture.