The first-officer went to the side and watched it. It was the white man who unhooked the sling, who spilled out the boxes, and sent the sling back empty, all with a promptness that no native lancheros could have hoped, or would have dreamed of, attempting to attain. These looked rather more than usually dead and alive. Nominally, he was not the capitan of the launch, but it was clear that he was the self-constituted boss of it. The captain of the steamer said as much—“Must make their heads swim, that fellow.”
The mate answered “Yes, sir,” again; but another net full of boxes was coming up. He went back to them. “J. S. & Co. over X, two times—Y in a diamond, one,” he called. The checky and the freight-clerk registered; and the work of the day was well under way.
But in spite of the one white man in the launch below it did not go with the speed the mate would have desired. The crew of the alternating launch was demoralized and worthless to the last degree. “Half dead—and it’s a fiesta besides, so they’re half drunk, too,” he remarked upon it to the captain. He pushed his cap back with the visor on his crown, and ran across his wet forehead the sleeve of a coat which had begun the day white. It was two o’clock of an October afternoon, and the heat was one of these things the fullness whereof can only be realized from having been experienced, which mere imagination is powerless to present.
The lancheros were fumbling aimlessly at a load of steel rails. There was no white man in this lighter, and the management of it showed as much. Three rails were swung clashing together down on some crates that smashed like match-boxes under them. The mate raised his shoulders. It was not his business—so long as the breakage was not done on the ship, he was not accountable for it. Checky and the capitan of the “lanch” could settle that on shore.
“What’s in those crates?” the captain inquired.
“Merchandise—breakable,” answered the first-officer, cheerfully.
“Brutes,” commented the captain. He gave expression to his views on black-and-tan lancheros in general.
The mate nodded. He bent over the hatchway. “Quartermaster,” he called, “send up somebody with a marlinspike to mend this sling.” Then he went over and looked down into the launch. “Despacio abajo, hurry up—eh?” he shouted by way of suggestion to four lancheros who were pulling two ways on every rail, and had managed to drop into the water a rope sling, which it was affording them much concern and confusion, and the others much chattering and amusement, to fish out again.
Marsden did not appear to be in a communicative mood, but the captain was oblivious to moods after the manner of the insistently good-humored and talkative.
“It must be infernally unpleasant for that white fellow to work with the dogs,” he opined.