“Just as a hundred men should be carrying bunches of bananas to our ship,” he thought.
“Yes, we have no bananas,” he grinned in spite of himself. All about him were bananas, a vast unending sea of them, a hundred thousand bunches. He had been promised twenty thousand. That treacherous Spanish manager, Diaz, had blocked his every move. Not a bunch had he delivered.
“Manana! Manana!” He had whispered over and over. “My workmen are scattered. They have gone turtle hunting. They are not here. To-morrow they will be back. To-morrow. To-morrow.”
“To-morrow!” the boy exclaimed. “When I get back to the States I shall have that word removed from the dictionary.”
Suddenly his lips parted, but no sound came forth. Rising upon one knee, he crouched there poised like some wild creature ready for a spring.
“Was that a voice?”
He felt reasonably sure of it, yet in this land of monkeys, parrots and mocking birds one could never be quite sure.
“If it is,” he told himself, “if they are that crafty Spaniard’s men sent to hunt me down, there may be a fight.
“And yet,” he thought, “why should he wish to hunt me down, to have me killed? He’s having his own sweet way. What more could he wish?”
He thought of the man sitting there on the veranda with Kennedy, thought too of Madge Kennedy. Madge Kennedy of the golden hair and frank freckled face, the bright, alert, clean Scotch girl of the jungle, and for some reason or another his brow clouded.