The big negro only flashed his teeth and waved his arm.  His little vessel went drifting astern.

“Pirates and wreckers—­look pretty much like honest people, don’t they?” commented Kieran.  “And they are mostly.  At least I’ve bunked with ’em—­white ones, though—­and I found ’em pretty much like you and me—­except for their ideas in that and maybe one or two other lines.  And most people, when you come to know them, aren’t so different, except in one way—­or maybe two or three ways in some cases.  Don’t you think so?”

The passenger countered with another question.  “You’ve met a good many different kinds of people in your time, haven’t you?”

The pump-man nodded.  After a pause he added, “A few,” in an absent manner.

The low-lying reefs sank out of sight, and far astern the green-painted schooner merged into the mists.  It was a warm, pleasant day.

Kieran roused himself.  “No, there wasn’t any girl in Zanzibar.  If there had been, a fellow couldn’t be advertising her to the crew of an oil-tanker at high-noon, could he?  No!  But there was a girl, and there was a friend of mine—­call him Cogan.  Oh, not a bad fellow—­no worse, maybe no better, than you or I, or most any of the old crowd we used to know, and he happened to drift down the Isthmus way—­into Colon—­during the Revolution.  Ever there?”

“Once, just after the Revolution.”

“And what did you think of it—­the Revolution?”

“M-m—­it surely did happen most opportunely for our interests.”

“Didn’t it, though?  And did you ever notice that quite a few of the revolutions in those Central American latitudes happen most opportunely for some northern interest or other?  Well, Cogan was there during the Revolution.  He told me of a saloon there, about a minute’s walk up from the big steamship dock on the street next the water-side—­remember that street?”

“Where the railroad starts to cross the Isthmus to Panama?”

“That’s it.  And this saloon was on that street—­it may be there yet—­the Fourth of July saloon with its big American ensign painted on the wall opposite the bar.  Remember it?”

“M-m-h-h.”

“Well, it was run by a Brooklyn Irishman named Martin Jackson, and Cogan said he remembered the shock he got when he first heard him talk.  His Irish brogue had a Spanish accent—­do you get that?  Well, he has nothing to do with the story, only this—­Cogan used to have great ideas about revolutions, and Martin, he knocked most of them out of him.  He’d seen twenty of them in his time, Martin had, and when he saw one of them coming now, he just ran up his iron shutters and let it roll by.  Business was generally pretty good after a revolution.  An easy-going sort of a man, Martin.  He didn’t even get mad with Cogan when he’d used up hours of his time and then only order ginger ale.