“Who is ‘she’?” inquired the latter.
“A female of mine,” he replied—“a young lady I am talking to.”
“Well, you don’t want to talk to a woman all the time, do you?” asked the American. “Is she your wife?”
“Not exactly,” said Jones; “she is a young female under my protection an’ care; I am responsible to her parents for her. We are practically husband an’ wife, though I don’t put a ring on her finger as yet.”
“Nothin’ doin’!” returned the clerk emphatically. “We kain’t allow them sort of things here. You’ve got to marry that female of yours if you want her to live in the Zone. Judge Riggs in the court building near here will fix you right now if you go to him, and then I’ll give you married people’s quarters. Now I guess there’s some other people waitin’ on me, so you’d better make up your mind quick, or get out.”
Jones stared at the clerk, wondering if he should not immediately resent his peremptory manner of disposing of Samuel Josiah Jones, but Mackenzie took him aside and explained to him that by an ordinance issued some time before, in obedience to the outraged moral sentiments of America, it was made compulsory that only married men and women should live together in the Zone. “It is a hard rule,” said Mackenzie, “an’ a lot of people only form that they married. The Americans don’t bother them, unless they can’t help it. But if them find it out, an’ have to take notice, there is a big fine. That’s why I warn you in time. P’rhaps you better married you’ sweetheart, an’ get a comfortable little house in the Zone, like a lot of other Jamaica people.”
“Me?” said Jones. “I let a man force me to marry if I don’t want to do it? No, me brother! It’s an infringement of the rights of the subject, that’s what I call it! I have a good mind to go back to that man an’ tell him I am a British subject an’ born under the English flag!”
“That’s what a lot of people from Jamaica is always sayin’ here,” replied Mackenzie dryly. “Only, some of them say they’re a British object.”
“An’ what the Americans do?” inquired Jones anxiously.
“Laugh at them, an’ say them don’t care what sort of object Jamaicans are. You don’t bluff out an American easy in this place, Jones. Them don’t talk a lot like we do in Jamaica; wid some of them it is a word an’ a blow, an’ a blow first if you cheek them too much.”