Connecting the lower zigzags (I need scarcely say) are
short-cuts or slides made by the brown-footed children, who plunge
down almost as steeply and quickly as the stream itself when the
fortnightly fruit-steamer blows her siren beyond the point.
There is no harbour, you understand. The small steamer--by name the
_P.M. Diaz_--drops anchor a short mile out in a half-protected
roadstead, and discharges what she has to discharge, or lades what
she has to lade, by boats. Her ladings during the banana-harvest are
feverish, tumultuous, vociferous. Her ladings during the sleepy
remainder of the year comprise canned meats, Scotch whisky,
illustrated magazines, and plantation inspectors.
It was almost twelve months to a day--I am trying to tell the story
to-night as a novelist would tell it, but without going beyond the
material supplied to me--It was almost twelve months from the day Foe
left the portico of the Flaxman Building Hotel, New York, that he
stepped ashore on the beach below San Ramon and resigned his light
suitcase to a herd of bare-legged boys who offered to carry it up to
the hotel, but seemed likelier to dismember it on the way and share
up the shreds.
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