“Why, go along and pay the bills, to be sure!” laughed Mr. Ashby.
“What else do you think a married man can do?” added Mr. Fabian.
About this time the gong boy came out on the verandah and made such a deafening din with the hammer and copper drum he carried that John Baxter beckoned him over.
“What’s the game now, Bo?” asked Jack.
“Lunsh’on, sah!” answered the young boy, pounding with might and main that all should hear the call to midday luncheon. But he looked at the dusty young man who questioned him, then showed his mighty disdain at the awful clothes covered with Jamaica real estate, by curling his nostrils and walking away from Jack.
Midst a merry peal of laughter at his expense, Jack got up and limped into the hotel in order to secure a room with bath where he might relieve his person of the undesirable weight of earth.
He had not been gone a minute ere a dusty, angry driver stumbled up the steps and gazed wildly at the group where his “fare” had been seated. Not seeing a man answering to the description, the man sought everywhere—inside and outside, for the man who had taken the license of using his horse and hack without permission, and left him, the owner, to walk all the way to the Spring Hotel to recover his business assets.
During the time the furious driver sought him, Jack reclined in a luxurious bath and managed to relieve himself and his hair of all the clinging dust he had accumulated in that mad race through knee-deep dust on the side-streets of Jamaica.
Mourning the loss of collecting the damages he had expected to claim from the New Yorker, the hack driver had to leave in his recovered surrey. But he made up his weak mind to find that young man when he should reappear on the quay some day to leave the town.