CHAPTER X
WEBSTER reached New Orleans at the end of the first leg of his journey, to discover that in the matter of sailings he was not fortunate. He was one day late to board the Atlanta—a banana boat of the Consolidated Fruit Company's line plying regularly between New Orleans and that company's depots at Limon and San Buenaventura—which necessitated a wait of three days for the steamer La Estrellita of the Caribbean Mail Line, running to Caracas and way ports.
This delay annoyed him, for he was the kind of man who, once he has made up his mind to embark upon a venture, is impatient to be up and doing. Accordingly, he decided to visit the ticket office of the Caribbean Mail Line immediately and avoid the rush in case the travel should be heavy—in which event a delay of an hour might be fatal—for should he be informed that the space on La Estrellita was entirely sold out, the knowledge would, he knew, set his reason tottering on its throne.
The steamship office was in Canal Street. Webster arrived there during the luncheon hour, due to which fact he found but one clerk on duty at the ticket counter when he entered. This clerk was waiting on two well-dressed and palpably low-bred sons of the tropics, to whom he had just displayed a passenger list which the two were scanning critically. Their interest in it was so obvious that unconsciously Webster peeped over their shoulders (no difficult task for one of his stature) and discovered it to be the passenger list of the steamer La Estrellita. They were conversing together in low tones and Webster, who had spent many years of his life following his profession in Mexico, recognized their speech as the bastard Spanish of the peon.
The clerk glanced up, caught Webster's eye and nodded to indicate that he would attend him directly.
“No hurry, old timer,” Webster told him, with the bluff, free-and-easy democracy of the man of broad, unkenned horizons. “Just save a place on that passenger list for my John Hancock when our friends here have finished with it.”
He sat down in the long wall seat and waited until the pair, having completed their scrutiny of the list, turned to pass out. He glanced at them casually.
Theirs were faces ordinary enough south of the Rio Grande but not likely to pass unnoticed in a northern crowd. One was a tall thin man whose bloodshot eyes were inclined to “pop” a little—infallible evidence in the Latin-American that he is drinking more hard liquor than is good for him. He was smooth-shaven, of pronounced Indian type, and wore considerable expensive jewellery.
His companion was plainly of the same racial stock, although Webster suspected him of a slight admixture of negro blood. He was short, stocky, and aggressive looking; like his companion, bejewelled and possessed of a thin, carefully cultivated mous, tache that seemed to consist of about nineteen hairs on one side and twenty on the other. Evidently once upon a time, as the story books have it, he had been shot. Webster suspected a Mauser bullet, fired at long range. It had entered his right cheek, just below the malar, ranged downward through his mouth and out through a fold of flabby flesh under his left jowl. It must have been a frightful wound, but it had healed well except at the point of entrance, where it had a tendency to pucker considerably, thus drawing the man's eyelid down on his cheek and giving to that visual organ something of the appearance of a bulldog's.
Both men observed Webster's swift but intense appraisal of them, and he of the puckered eye—perhaps because he was the cynosure of that scrutiny and morbidly sensitive of his facial disfigurement—replied with a cool, sullen stare that was almost belligerent.