"If you want to stay aboard, you'll have to pay in advance. You're not so foolish as you try to make out."
"Those are glorious words of praise," Kirk acknowledged, "but I'll make a bet with you."
"What?"
"That you change your mind. I am just as foolish as I appear, and I'll prove it. I'll bet my ring against your shirts that my name is Anthony, and if I don't come through with the price of a ticket to New York you can keep the ring."
"Very well, but meanwhile I don't intend to be stuck for your bill."
The purser was a man of admirable caution.
"All right, then, I shall throw myself upon the mercy of strangers and take your belongings with me."
By this time the ship was being warped into her berth, and the dock was crowded. There were little brown customs inspectors in khaki, little brown policemen in blue, little brown merchants in white, and huge black Jamaicans in all colors of rags. Here and there moved a bronzed, businesslike American, and Anthony noticed that for the most part these were clean-cut, aggressive-looking young fellows.
He was delayed but an instant by the customs officials, then made his way out through a barnlike structure to the street, reflecting that, after all, there are advantages in travelling light. He came into a blazing-hot, glaring white street jammed with all sorts of vehicles, the drivers of which seemed perpetually upon the point of riot. Before him stretched a shadeless brick pavement, with a railroad track on one side, and on the other a line of naked frame buildings hideous in their sameness. The sun beat down fiercely. Kirk mopped his face with the purser's handkerchief and wondered if this were really December.
Clumsy two-wheeled carts came bumping past, some with prehensile-footed negroes perched upon them, others driven by turban-crowned Hindoos. A fleet of dilapidated surreys and coaches, each equipped with a musical chime and drawn by a flea-bitten, ratlike horse, thronged the square. Kirk noticed with amusement that the steeds were of stronger mentality than the drivers, judging from the way they dominated the place, kicking, biting squealing, ramming one another, locking wheels and blocking traffic, the while their futile owners merely jerked the reins after the fashion of a street-car conductor ringing up fares, or swore softly in Spanish. Silent-footed coolies drifted past, sullen-faced negroes jostled him, stately Martinique women stalked through the confusion with queenly dignity. These last were especially qualified to take the stranger's eye, being tall and slender and wearing gaudy head-dresses, the tips of which stood up like rabbits' ears. Unlike the fat and noisy Jamaicans, they were neat and clean, their skirts snow-white and stiffly starched, and they held themselves as proudly erect as if pacing a stage.
The indescribable confusion of races reminded the young American of a Red Sea port where the myriad peoples of the far East intermingle. He heard a dozen different dialects; even the negroes used an accent that was difficult to understand. One thing only struck a familiar note, and that with peculiar force and sharpness. Down the railroad track toward him came a locomotive with the letters "P. R. R." upon it, at which he said aloud: