“Why you stay out so long?” Susan asked, speaking for the first time and showing no inclination either to eat or to be happy.
“Couldn’t help it,”, he replied. “Mac wanted to treat me good, an’ I wouldn’t have been a gentleman if I refused him.”
A sandwich in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other, he smiled jovially as if in approval of his own meritorious conduct. But he gave her no opportunity to comment on his ideas of gentlemanly behaviour.
“You know, Sue,” he observed, “I think you are a lucky girl? I am acquainted with about twenty other females, an’ them would kill themselves to be here to-night. But I am a man of emphatic decisiveness, an’ when I select a gurl I will stick to her—if she behave herself.” He paused, in order that she might mark the proviso well. Then he added, “But you will behave you’self.
“Tell you what!” he went on enthusiastically. “I am goin’ to raise cain as soon as I meet a few more Jamaica boys like Mac. No American man is goin’ to boss me. A Jamaican is more than a match for anybody; an’ if a man ever talk to me hard in this country, I kick him!”
“Y’u can’t kick anybody in this country,” said Susan quietly; “it’s not home.”
“Don’t matter. They got to think a lot of me in this low-down place. I won’t let a man interfere with you, either. I intend to stick to you.”
Susan, sitting on the cot, shifted her position a little. She had listened carefully to all that Samuel had said; she had noticed how persistently he dwelt upon his intention to stick to her—she had especially noticed that he expected her to behave herself. But to one matter, which had been in her mind ever since they landed, he had not once alluded. She intended that it should be discussed that night.
“See here, Sam,” she began, with simple directness, “you say on board the ship night before last that you was goin’ to marry me as soon as you get to Colon. But all day to-day y’u don’t say nothing about it. You goin’ to do it to-morrow?”
Samuel Josiah Jones paused in the act of conveying a glass of whisky to his lips and stared at Susan with a countenance expressive of profoundest astonishment. Susan’s question appeared to him a most unreasonable one. He was silent for some seconds, then in a tone of voice which was eloquent with reproach, and even with sorrow, he answered: