"Cayenne pepper, eh those damned, horrible, crazyproud Solanos," the breed skipper flashed at Francis with white teeth of laughter.
"Just bugs clean crazy, nobody at home," Francis laughed back, as he sprang to the rail to waft further kisses to the strange damsel.
Before the land wind, the Ang clique made the outer rim of Chiriqui Lagoon and the Bull and Calf, some fifty miles farther along on the rim, by midnight, when the skipper hove to to wait for daylight. After breakfast, rowed by a Jamaica negro sailor in the skiff, Francis landed to reconnoiter on the Bull, which was the larger island and which the skipper had told him ho might find occupied at that season of the year by turtle-catching Indians from the mainland.
And Francis very immediately found that he had traversed not merely thirty degrees of latitude from New York but thirty hundred years, or centuries for that matter, from the last word of civilisation to almost the first word of the primeval. Naked, except for breech-clouts of gunnysacking, armed with cruelly heavy hacking blades of machetes, the turtle-catchers were swift in proving themselves arrant beggars and dangerous man-killers. The Bull belonged to them, they told him through the medium of his Jamaican sailor's interpreting; but the Calf, which used to belong to them for the turtle season now was possessed by a madly impossible Gringo, whose reckless, dominating ways had won from them the respect of fear for a twolegged human creature who was more fearful than themselves.
While Francis, for a silver dollar, dispatched one of them with a message to the mysterious Gringo that he desired to call on him, the rest of them clustered about Francis' skiff, whining for money, glowering upon him, and even impudently stealing his pipe, yet warm from his lips, which he had laid beside him in the sternsheets. Promptly he had laid a blow on the ear of the thief, and the next thief who seized it, and recovered the pipe. Machetes out and sun-glistening their clean-slicing menace, Francis covered and controlled the gang with an automatic pistol; and, while they drew apart in a group and whispered ominously, he made the discovery that his lone sailor-interpreter was a weak brother and received his returned messenger.
The negro went over to the turtle-catchers and talked with a friendliness and subservience, the tones of which Francis did not like. The messenger handed him his note, across which was scrawled in pencil:
"Vamos."
"Guess I'll have to go across myself," Francis told the negro whom he had beckoned back to him.
"Better be very careful and utmostly cautious, sir," the negro warned him. "These animals without reason are very problematically likely to act most unreasonably, sir."
"Get into the boat and row me over," Francis commanded shortly.