The breeze had fallen and the shining sea was smooth as glass when the
launch passed Adexe. Dick, who lounged at the helm, was not going there.
Some alterations to a mole along the coast had just been finished, and
Stuyvesant had sent him to engage the contractor who had done the
concrete work. Jake, who occasionally found his duties irksome, had
insisted on coming.
As they crossed the mouth of the inlet, Dick glanced shorewards through
his glasses. The whitewashed coal-sheds glistened dazzlingly, and a
fringe of snowy surf marked the curve of beach, but outside this a belt
of cool, blue water extended to the wharf. The swell surged to and fro
among the piles, checkered with purple shadows and laced with threads of
foam, but it was the signs of human activity that occupied Dick's
attention. He noticed the cloud of dust that rolled about the mounds of
coal upon the wharf and blurred the figures of the toiling peons, and the
way the tubs swung up and down from the hatches of an American collier
until the rattle of her winches suddenly broke off.
"They seem to be doing a big business," he remarked. "It looks as if that
boat had stopped discharging, but she must have landed a large quantity
of coal."
"There's pretty good shelter at Adexe," Jake replied. "In ordinary
weather, steamers can come up to the wharf, instead of lying a quarter of
a mile off, as they do at Santa Brigida. However, there's not much cargo
shipped, and a captain who wanted his bunkers filled would have to make a
special call with little chance of picking up any freight. That must tell
against the place."
They were not steaming fast, and just before a projecting point shut in
the inlet the deep blast of a whistle rang across the water and the
collier's dark hull swung out from the wharf. A streak of foam, cut
sharply between her black side and the shadowed blue of the sea, marked
her load-line, and she floated high, but not as if she were empty.
"Going on somewhere else to finish, I guess," said Jake. "How much do you
reckon she has discharged?"
"Fifteen hundred tons, if she was full when she came in, and I imagine
they hadn't much room in the sheds before. I wonder where Kenwardine gets
the money, unless his friend, Richter, is rich."
"Richter has nothing to do with the business," Jake replied. "He was to
have had a share, but they couldn't come to a satisfactory agreement."
Dick looked at him sharply. "How do you know?"
"I really don't know much. Kenwardine said something about it one night
when I was at his house."
"Did somebody ask him?"
"No," said Jake, "I don't think so. The subject, so to speak, cropped up
and he offered us the information."