He had looked up at the girl whose golden hair, golden freckles and dark green dress so completely blended with fruit and foliage that, until now, he had not seen her.
“Have you a donkey?” There was a suggestion of a laugh in the girl’s tone. “I don’t see any.”
“Why must I have a donkey?” Johnny looked his surprise.
“Because we sell them by the barrel. Fifty cents a barrel. Of course, for a quarter you’d only get a half a barrel. But even so, how are you going to carry them?” Shaking out her dress and laughing the girl had dropped to the ground.
Out of his little adventure in the grapefruit orchard had grown a new enterprise. Johnny suddenly decided to become a shipping agent. Madge Kennedy, who had turned out to be a Scotch girl, had insisted upon his accompanying her to the house to meet her grandfather, Donald Kennedy. The grandfather, a great gray-bearded man with a store of knowledge that could come only from long study and many years in the jungle, had proven a find indeed. Johnny did not soon tire of sitting on the broad veranda of the long one-story house, listening to the old man as he rambled on about bananas and grapefruit, strange tropical foods, Carib Indians, and the future of their little Central American Colony.
It had not taken Johnny long to discover, however, that these kindly people were really almost paupers in the midst of their abundance. Many carloads of the finest fruit in the world hung ripe on the trees. Why was it not being shipped?
When he had pressed them for an answer to this puzzling question, Madge Kennedy had told him that the fruit company had refused to accept their fruit. The reason, she supposed, was that her grandfather had two years before sold his crop to the owner of a tramp steamer. The great East Sea Fruit Company, which had a monopoly on the fruit trade of Central America, did not wish competition, and they took this method of punishing her grandfather.
“But say!” Johnny leaped to his feet. “I’ll find you a ship. There’s one anchored off Belize now. Jorgensen is the captain. He’s anxious enough for a cargo. Came all this way for a cargo of mahogany. The half-caste Indian woodcutters are on a strike. There is no mahogany to haul.”
“Oh!” Madge beamed upon him in sudden excitement.
“But then,” her smile vanished, “I know the ship. It’s no use. We have only a third of a cargo for her.”