“Perhaps so, Mac. I had this feeling once before. It was when I got word from a pal in New York, telling me about this job, that it was on the run to Cartagena. What is Cartagena like?”
“Wait and see it, my boy. Cartagena is a vision of vanished adventures, a gorgeous old Spanish treasure town preserved, by a sort of miracle, through three hundred years. Romance, color, tradition? It makes the days of the tall galleons and the bold sea dogs live again.”
“Tell me more about it,” demanded Richard Cary. His voice rolled out in a deep and masterful note.
“Come down to my room after the ship docks and I’ll give you some books to read, Kingsley’s ‘Westward Ho,’ Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ and Captain Burney’s ‘History of the Buccaneers of America.’ ”
Some small sound in the engine-room far below them diverted McClement’s attention. His perception of such things was uncannily acute. He vanished instantly down the nearest stairway. Richard Cary also found work to do. This broke the spell of his day-dreaming. It did not recur to him during the Tarragona’s brief stay at Kingston. In the evening he was on duty at the cargo hatches while the passengers swarmed ashore to find entertainment at the excessively modern and luxurious hotel.
He had leisure to saunter a little way from the wharf, but felt no desire to explore Kingston. It was quite common-place, the streets noisy with electric cars and automobiles, the brick and wooden buildings as cheap and unlovely as those of any American town. Several charming young passengers failed to persuade him to join a party at the hotel where an orchestra was jazzing it, and he also declined, with due caution, the hospitality of thirsty voyagers who were making a night of it.
Returning to the ship, he went to his room at midnight and picked up the chief engineer’s books instead of turning in. Presently he found himself fascinated. For the sake of comfort he shifted into pajamas and lay stretched in the bunk. The ship’s bell tolled one half-hour after another and he was still reading. These printed pages were a key that unlocked the gates of enchantment. Now and then he lost himself in absorbed reverie.
These chronicles of hazards and escapes and hard fighting in the waters that washed the Spanish Main had been derived from documents, from the robust memoirs of men whose bones had crumbled in a century now dim and dead. The rich ports whose walls they had stormed with a bravado that defied all odds were no more than fragments of ruined masonry submerged in the jungle growth, Nombre de Dios, Porto Bello, and old Panama, names that still reëcho like the brazen blare of trumpets.
All gone save Cartagena, reflected Richard Cary. Cartagena still basking by the sea to recall that day when Francis Drake and his Devon lads had stormed it with the naked sword.
At length this brawny second mate of the Tarragona laid the books aside. Dawn was brightening the windows of his room. He thrust his bare feet into straw slippers and went on deck to loaf in the fresh morning air. His head was buzzing. He felt fatigued, although as a mariner he was hardened to wakeful nights.