“Well, now, I’ll tell you what I would do,” said the captain: “I would have none of your fancy rigs with the man driving from the mizzen cross-trees, but a plain fore-and-aft hack cab of the highest registered tonnage. First of all, I would bring up at the market and get a turkey and a sucking-pig. Then I’d go to a wine-merchant’s and get a dozen of champagne, and a dozen of some sweet wine, rich and sticky and strong, something in the port or madeira line, the best in the store. Then I’d bear up for a toy-store, and lay out twenty dollars in assorted toys for the pickaninnies; and then to a confectioner’s and take in cakes and pies and fancy bread, and that stuff with the plums in it; and then to a newsagency and buy all the papers, all the picture ones for the kids, and all the story papers for the old girl about the Earl discovering himself to Anna-Mariar and the escape of the Lady Maude from the private madhouse; and then I’d tell the fellow to drive home.”
“There ought to be some syrup for the kids,” suggested Herrick; “they like syrup.”
“Yes, syrup for the kids, red syrup at that!” said the captain. “And those things they pull at, and go pop, and have measly poetry inside. And then I tell you we’d have a thanksgiving-day and Christmas-tree combined. Great Scott, but I would like to see the kids! I guess they would light right out of the house when they saw daddy driving up. My little Adar—”
The captain stopped sharply.
“Well, keep it up!” said the clerk.
“The damned thing is, I don’t know if they ain’t starving!” cried the captain.
“They can’t be worse off than we are, and that’s one comfort,” returned the clerk. “I defy the devil to make me worse off.”
It seemed as if the devil heard him. The light of the moon had been some time cut off and they had talked in darkness. Now there was heard a roar, which drew impetuously nearer; the face of the lagoon was seen to whiten; and before they had staggered to their feet, a squall burst in rain upon the outcasts. The rage and volume of that avalanche one must have lived in the tropics to conceive; a man panted in its assault as he might pant under a shower-bath; and the world seemed whelmed in night and water.
They fled, groping for their usual shelter—it might be almost called their home—in the old calaboose; came drenched into its empty chambers; and lay down, three sops of humanity, on the cold coral floors, and presently, when the squall was overpast, the others could hear in the darkness the chattering of the clerk’s teeth.
“I say, you fellows,” he wailed, “for God’s sake, lie up and try to warm me. I’m blymed if I don’t think I’ll die else!”