But to-day he who proclaimed the Pajaro gained his honours.  Ratona bent its ear to listen; and soon the deep-tongued blast grew louder and nearer, and at length Ratona saw above the line of palms on the low “point” the two black funnels of the fruiter slowly creeping toward the mouth of the harbour.

You must know that Ratona is an island twenty miles off the south of a South American republic.  It is a port of that republic; and it sleeps sweetly in a smiling sea, toiling not nor spinning; fed by the abundant tropics where all things “ripen, cease and fall toward the grave.”

Eight hundred people dream life away in a green-embowered village that follows the horseshoe curve of its bijou harbour.  They are mostly Spanish and Indian mestizos, with a shading of San Domingo Negroes, a lightening of pure-blood Spanish officials and a slight leavening of the froth of three or four pioneering white races.  No steamers touch at Ratona save the fruit steamers which take on their banana inspectors there on their way to the coast.  They leave Sunday newspapers, ice, quinine, bacon, watermelons and vaccine matter at the island and that is about all the touch Ratona gets with the world.

The Pajaro paused at the mouth of the harbour, rolling heavily in the swell that sent the whitecaps racing beyond the smooth water inside.  Already two dories from the village—­one conveying fruit inspectors, the other going for what it could get—­were halfway out to the steamer.

The inspectors’ dory was taken on board with them, and the Pajaro steamed away for the mainland for its load of fruit.

The other boat returned to Ratona bearing a contribution from the Pajaro’s store of ice, the usual roll of newspapers and one passenger—­Taylor Plunkett, sheriff of Chatham County, Kentucky.

Bridger, the United States consul at Ratona, was cleaning his rifle in the official shanty under a bread-fruit tree twenty yards from the water of the harbour.  The consul occupied a place somewhat near the tail of his political party’s procession.  The music of the band wagon sounded very faintly to him in the distance.  The plums of office went to others.  Bridger’s share of the spoils—­the consulship at Ratona—­was little more than a prune—­a dried prune from the boarding-house department of the public crib.  But $900 yearly was opulence in Ratona.  Besides, Bridger had contracted a passion for shooting alligators in the lagoons near his consulate, and was not unhappy.

He looked up from a careful inspection of his rifle lock and saw a broad man filling his doorway.  A broad, noiseless, slow-moving man, sunburned almost to the brown of Vandyke.  A man of forty-five, neatly clothed in homespun, with scanty light hair, a close-clipped brown-and-gray beard and pale-blue eyes expressing mildness and simplicity.

“You are Mr. Bridger, the consul,” said the broad man.  “They directed me here.  Can you tell me what those big bunches of things like gourds are in those trees that look like feather dusters along the edge of the water?”