It broke in upon the captain then that he was being discouraged. “Oh!” he said. There followed a pause. “You’d better have a new rope through that block there when you’re ready to hoist those iron chimney stacks.”
“Yes, sir,” answered the mate. The captain strolled off to the quarter-deck to watch the second-steward fishing for sharks.
But time was not hanging heavy on Marsden’s hands. There was a look of bad weather, and if they were to get off that night, as might prove highly desirable, there had got to be a lot more hustling than the lancheros seemed capable of.
The launch alongside had about all it could carry, and its capitan was calling for the tug, the soft, mournful note of his conch shell floating over the water to the shore. Marsden, by way of losing no time himself, ran up to the hurricane-deck and on to the bridge, and the whistle screeched across the blue-green of the sea, glinting in the sun, across the little port among its palms, and beyond through the lush jungle of the piling mountains, where the trees and vines and undergrowth matted in the moist, breathless temperature of a green-house. There were black clouds piling up behind the mountains, and rolling low into the great cañons and clefts of palm and fern trees. Marsden eyed them as he went below again.
The launch alongside was loaded and sent adrift, to be picked up by the tug and towed back to the wharf. The tug was bringing out the other one—the one in which Stanwood was of the crew. Marsden wished that he were not. A man may have been your enemy. He may have brought about your finish. You may have thought for years that nothing could be too bad for him. But all the same—if he is a white man, one of your own kind, be he never so much of a scoundrel, it is not good to see him working among Central American lancheros, under a capitan of the same breed. It is a trifle too low. He is one of your own race, after all, and it hits you through the race.
Marsden stood considering, keeping his balance as the ship rolled, at an angle of forty-five degrees to the line of the deck, backward or forward, according as she went to weather or to lee. It would have taken quite all the attention of a landsman to manage the feat at any effort, and with that he would probably have gone upon his skull or his nose. But Marsden was not even thinking about it. He was thinking of the time that Stanwood had bribed a Guatemala high official—with money already a long way from clean—and had thereby established in that misgoverned little country his altogether baseless claim to Marsden’s own sugar finca and refinery. It was the kind of thing that can be, and is constantly being, done south of twenty-three. And all your American citizenship can not avail to save you; rather, in fact, the other way—one of the mishaps of which you take your chance when you go to those countries to make a fortune, away from the hustle of colder climes. But it had been a blackguardly trick, nevertheless. And it had done for Marsden financially for good and all. He had thought himself in luck afterward to get the opportunity to ship to San Francisco on a P. M. steamer as a hand. He had been down to his last real then.
It had done for him in other ways, too. Even now that he had got his master’s license, and worked up by quick stages to first-mate—well—his people on the other side of the continent lived a different sort of life, went in for another and more conventional style of thing. So did the people of the girl he had meant to make mistress of his beautiful sugar plantation. He had been in love with her since his school-days at home—pretty much ever since he could remember, so far as that went. But it had obviously been out of the question to expect her to marry a deck-hand. He had stopped writing to her before long. It had been better for her. As for himself—it didn’t matter much. His own life was very thoroughly spoiled, anyway. And the girl had married—a man of her own sort, which he himself had ceased to be.
He owed all that to Stanwood. He owed a good deal to Stanwood. He had always intended to pay it some day, too—at the first chance that should present itself. Was this the chance? Perhaps.
Evidently wrong-doing had not prospered Stanwood. He had probably come out with that degraded, dirty gang, in that “lanch” which stunk of bilge water and other filth beyond a white man’s stomach almost, for no other reason than to get an opportunity to stow, or to ask a passage up—as Marsden himself had been obliged to ask five years before. He would not try it now, of course. He had nerve enough for about anything, but hardly enough for that. He would have to wait at least a week for another ship and another first-officer.
It happened, nevertheless, that Marsden wanted another sailor. At the last port, Corinto, one of his men had gone ashore to see one of the sick mothers he kept along the coast, and that had been the last seen of him. Marsden was anxious to fill the vacancy, but Stanwood should not have it. He could work with the launch gang a while longer. It was small enough punishment for his misdeeds.