FullReads

“How big was that nugget you referred to?” I queried firmly. “As big as the biggest of those?”

“Bigger,” he said quietly. “Bigger than the whole blamed exhibit of them put together, and then some.” He paused and regarded me with a steadfast gaze. “I don’t see no reason why I shouldn’t go into the matter with you. You’ve got a reputation a man ought to be able to trust, and I’ve read you’ve done some tall skylarking yourself in out-of-the-way places. I’ve been browsing around with an eye open for some one to go in with me on the proposition.”

“You can trust me,” I said.

And here I am, blazing out into print with the whole story just as he told it to me as we sat on a bench by the lagoon before the Palace of Fine Arts with the cries of the sea gulls in our ears. Well, he should have kept his appointment with me. But I anticipate.

As we started to leave the building and hunt for a seat, a small woman, possibly thirty years of age, with a washed-out complexion of the farmer’s wife sort, darted up to him in a bird-like way, for all the world like the darting veering gulls over our heads and fastened herself to his arm with the accuracy and dispatch and inevitableness of a piece of machinery.

“There you go!” she shrilled. “A-trottin’ right off and never givin’ me a thought.”

I was formally introduced to her. It was patent that she had never heard of me, and she surveyed me bleakly with shrewd black eyes, set close together and as beady and restless as a bird’s.

“You ain’t goin’ to tell him about that hussy?” she complained.

“Well, now, Sarah, this is business, you see,” he argued plaintively. “I’ve been lookin’ for a likely man this long while, and now that he’s shown up it seems to me I got a right to give him the hang of what happened.”

The small woman made no reply, but set her thin lips in a needle- like line. She gazed straight before her at the Tower of Jewels with so austere an expression that no glint of refracted sunlight could soften it. We proceeded slowly to the lagoon, managed to obtain an unoccupied seat, and sat down with mutual sighs of relief as we released our weights from our tortured sightseeing feet.

“One does get so mortal weary,” asserted the small woman, almost defiantly.

Two swans waddled up from the mirroring water and investigated us. When their suspicions of our niggardliness or lack of peanuts had been confirmed, Jones half-turned his back on his life-partner and gave me his story.

“Ever been in Ecuador? Then take my advice–and don’t. Though I take that back, for you and me might be hitting it for there together if you can rustle up the faith in me and the backbone in yourself for the trip. Well, anyway, it ain’t so many years ago that I came ambling in there on a rusty, foul-bottomed, tramp collier from Australia, forty-three days from land to land. Seven knots was her speed when everything favoured, and we’d had a two weeks’ gale to the north’ard of New Zealand, and broke our engines down for two days off Pitcairn Island.

“I was no sailor on her. I’m a locomotive engineer. But I’d made friends with the skipper at Newcastle an’ come along as his guest for as far as Guayaquil. You see, I’d heard wages was ‘way up on the American railroad runnin’ from that place over the Andes to Quito. Now Guayaquil–“

“Is a fever-hole,” I interpolated.

Julian Jones nodded.

“Thomas Nast died there of it within a month after he landed.–He was our great American cartoonist,” I added.

“Don’t know him,” Julian Jones said shortly. “But I do know he wasn’t the first to pass out by a long shot. Why, look you the way I found it. The pilot grounds is sixty miles down the river. ‘How’s the fever?’ said I to the pilot who came aboard in the early morning. ‘See that Hamburg barque,’ said he, pointing to a sizable ship at anchor. ‘Captain and fourteen men dead of it already, and the cook and two men dying right now, and they’re the last left of her.’