"And then there's that gang on the dock...."
"It's just Old Tom and some of my father's workmen."
"I know." The captain relit his pipe. "But any other Caribbean port I stop at, the dock workers are singing and skylarking. Those fellows never say a word. Rum, I call it! Some of my crew think they're jumbies ... won't set foot on shore here."
"Jumbies are one thing I can assure you they're not, captain," Jonathan chuckled. "They're just plain workmen—and English to boot. As for the Old Tom, he carried me on his shoulders when I was a kid."
"Cheerio, Tom," he continued after the lines had been made fast and the ebony-colored ancient was clambering over the rail. "Where's father?"
"I'm sorry, sir." The answer came in the clipped British accent of the West Indies. "Your father is dead, sir, these two weeks."
"Dead!" A picture of the sixth Jonathan Robertson, austere in his white linens, flashed through Jonathan's mind. It seemed impossible that he was no longer striding on his daily rounds to the factory and mine.
"Yes sir. Perhaps we'd better go up to the house at once, sir, if you don't mind. I'll tell the men to follow with the cargo." Tom turned to the leaden-faced, overall-clad trio on the pier and shouted; "Men! Take cargo to store-house. Bill! Ye ken?"
"Yah!" grunted the man on the left.
"Fred! Ye ken? Cargo to store-house?"