“The alligator,” he insisted. “We want the tale of the alligator!”
The old man stared at him in gentle surprise.
“You wouldn’t keep a man of my age out of his berth to tell you yarns thirty years old?” he deprecated.
“We would,” said Mathers determinedly. “What’s yours?”
Startled out of his equanimity, the ancient allowed that so far he had encountered nothing to abash whisky—plain. But as for the story at that time of night—well, well, they needn’t make all that noise. If it had to be done he supposed he had better get to it as quickly as possible. He paused, took a gulp at the tumbler the steward placed before him, and let a meditative glance dwell upon Morehead, who had made a motion to rise. Catching his eye, the Floridian suddenly abandoned his purpose, and sat down in a pose of exasperated resignation.
“It was somewhere about ’81—or it might be ’82,” began the old man, anchoring his gaze mildly upon Morehead’s uncompromising features, “that I landed at Santiago from Savannah, with a letter in my pocket from my late employer, George S. Gage, to Señor Emil Blique, Buena Esperanza; the letter and myself being respectively part answers to a wild telegram that my boss had received ten days before. The West Indian had cabled that his manager had died of yellow fever, and that he was alone with nothing but creole help to drive the congregation of hard-shell niggers and dagos that he paid to grub manganese from the bowels of the earth.
“He wanted a man, he said, with a knowledge of mining and with two working fists. He laid particular stress upon the second qualification, and offered such a one three hundred dollars a month to come at the earliest opportunity.
“Gage told me that if I’d the spirit of a louse I’d run along and take it. Otherwise, he said, he’d offer it to Altsheler, the under manager, who was a wicked man behind a pistol, but with no kind of idea of using four fingers and a thumb when the gun got lost. That’s a terrible fault among dagos. They are frightened of a knock-down blow, because they don’t understand it. But when you start gunning among them—well, they can gun and knife themselves—some.
“You mightn’t think it, gentlemen, but in those days I’d a fist like a ham, and I concluded, after consideration, that the job was built for my particular talents and not for Altsheler’s. Ten days after that telegram arrived I was bumping along the trail to Blique Mountain, wondering just how hard those three hundred dollars would be to collect at the end of every four weeks.
“I needn’t have troubled. For a Jamaican, old Emil was as straight a man as I have ever known. His cheque was good money every time I cashed it, and, when I’d got the hang of the business, fairly easy earned. During the first fortnight I filled an eye for two mine hands per diem, and by the end of that time the crowd began to understand just where their best interest lay. They reasoned it out that they’d have to do as they were told, and after that things went like clockwork. When I’d got them really tame, indeed, I found that I could slack off in the afternoons when old man Blique was moving about himself, and so I looked around for relaxation. Like all of you, I was something of a fisherman.