Chigo debated with the padron; the boy made some suggestions. They thought it might be forty kilometres, thirty kilometres; perhaps not so much.
“Twenty kilometres, we going there,” the padron said.
Twenty kilometres was about eleven miles, Hi thought. He tried to figure it out, how it could be so little, but thought that these men might know. All the time the boat was moving away from the pierhead.
“Say that it is twenty miles,” Hi thought, “and this ten miles more sailing added on to it, I shall not be there till the afternoon.”
“See,” the padron said, to Hi, with reproach, “you should not have angered the commandant.”
“No,” Chigo added. “If you not speak at all, if you leave it to the padron, he let you land all right.”
“I’m blest if he would,” Hi said.
“Si, si.”
“He would not have: he had refused.”
“No, see,” Chigo explained, “the padron he explain: he say what, that man not go any sense, he let you land all right.”