"No," I said, "you're not a pearler, and I don't buy pearls in moonshine on the long jetty."
"Oh, no trouble about that, master," he said. "Everybody in Broome buys 'snide.' You pay me bimeby all right."
"No," I said, "but don't worry yourself. I don't blab."
He
moved away shaking his head. Then five noisy shell-openers and the
billiard marker from the "Spotted Deer" strode along the creaky planks
towards us. They, too, were coming to fish. They baited and cast their
lines. Within two minutes they and Da Silva and I all sang out
together. Our lines had been dragged out of our hands. The water
beneath us was lashed into spray and foam. An unusually large fiddler
shark had hooked himself on Da Silva's line and in his frenzied dash
for liberty had fouled everyone else's line too. They held him
enmeshed, and we had the devil of a job playing him alongside to the
foot of the lower jetty steps.
However,
we landed him all right. Then one of the waggish shell-openers had a
bright idea. He proposed that we run him on the pier trolley over the
rails which lead to the town. In a jiffy we obeyed the crazy
suggestion. . . . The only time I ever saw Jose in a temper was when he
entered the billiard room after breakfast next morning and found the
gasping fiddler oozing salt-sea slime and blood on the green cloth of
his best table.
Jim,
the handyman at the "Diver's Rest," was a big Barbados negro who
looked after the horses and buggies and did odd jobs about the place.
He had roamed the world and spoke Plattdeutsch like a native of
Hamburg. "De Hamburger Fraun sin sehr schene," he would say, apropos of nothing in particular, to be followed up by some such remark as "Ik schlaf gem mit weiss Frau."
In
some parts of the United States a twist of Manila hemp would have been
his lot for merely giving vent to such unseemly sentiments. I could
never make up my mind whether he was a rogue or just an irresponsible
child of nature. Probably he was both.
The paper twist he threw upon my bed one day when he
