“‘Ford one time,’ he repeated, taking a lump of offal and tossing it into the stream. Then he gave me another nudge, and grinned. ‘Joaquin—’ he drew my attention to the dun snout that came floating down upon the bait—‘Joaquin make it ferry!’
“I gave him one look, and he answered me with a grimace that would have done credit to an idol. Then I sat down and laughed and laughed till I was sore. The originality of it! The old scoundrel was positively and actually maintaining his private alligator to put the fear of death upon the niggers and mulattos that used the short cut into the town, and was reaping a harvest of ferry dues over a four-foot deep river!
“He watched me, as I shouted, quite politely, and when I’d had my laugh out insisted on escorting me into his house and offering me a glass of aguardiente. While I was sipping it he was rummaging among his litter and finally produced me a line in the place of the one that Joaquin had snatched. He insisted on binding it on to my reel, and then, in his broken English, began to explain just where the best fishing stands could be found along the banks. And he didn’t stop a-telling. He took me out when the sun got lower and gave me a few practical hints upon the spot. He laid himself out to be agreeable, and at the end of a couple of hours we were as thick as thieves.
“When we got back to the shanty we found a thick, squat, low-browed young man smoking a cigarette on the veranda. The old man introduced him as his son, Concepcion. The youth bowed, smirked and expressed his sense of the honor in perfect English, yet somehow I didn’t take to him as I had done to his parent. He had the same magpie way of looking at you as his father had, but with a difference. The old man did it with a laugh in his eye: the young one furtively, shiftily and without the ghost of a smile.
“It came about that for the next twelve months I was thrown a good deal into the company of the Garsias. They lived openly on the earnings of their ferry, but I suspected that they made a little by selling aguardiente to my dagos and niggers. But they knew when to stop—they never sent one of my crowd back so’s he couldn’t take his spell the day after a carouse, and anything short of that I winked at.
“Old man Blique was not a conversationalist, and the two at the bungalow were practically my only company for days together. And when they were out of the way I got into the habit of regarding even Joaquin as a sort of companion. I got to know his haunts, and where a newcomer would have seen nothing but an ugly log, half buried in the mud, I could recognize the upper half of the alligator’s countenance and his little, straight, slit eyes winking at me most benevolent.
“And yet he was the one that put an end to all this simplicity and loving kindness. I don’t know if the fish supply in the river grew short. Perhaps in his old age he developed epicurean tastes. But nasty stories suddenly began to come in. Fowls went, pigs were missed and never heard of again, a couple of steers disappeared from an estancia higher up the river, and a mare of Emil’s was robbed of her colt and pervaded the banks of the bayou for weeks, neighing like a lost soul. Joaquin grew to be the most unpopular personage in the neighborhood.
“The worst, however, was to come. Red Rambo, the head man of a gang that worked Number 44 level, and a mulatto went spreeing off to Santiago one fine evening before a Saint’s Day. The next afternoon, late, as I was fishing, he appeared on the opposite bank, evidently full up, calling to Pedro to fetch him and his mates across. The moment the old man had got the pirogue against the far bank Red Rambo started to call him every kind of extortioner and money-sucker, and, seeing that it was from a mulatto to a pure-breed creole, I don’t wonder that the old man got mad. He refused to take the fellow over—told him to cool his blood by walking six miles round.
“Unfortunately Rambo had drunk himself up to the pitch of Dutch obstinacy and Dutch courage. He came splashing into the river, wading after the pirogue and cursing Pedro by every saint in the nigger calendar.
“Some of the low-down half-castes, who’d believe anything, used to declare that Joaquin was the familiar spirit of the Garsia family and was sworn to protect them in this life in return for a note of hand for their souls in the life to come. I could see some of the men in the boat just shivering for Red Rambo as they listened to the insults he was piling upon the old boy, and their shivers were prophetic. For there came a sudden swirl upon the surface of the calm in midstream, and then a little grooving eddy shot toward the mulatto with the rush of a millrace.