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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 squinted an eye and looked through his rifle barrel. "There's nobody on the island who calls himself 'Williams," he remarked. "Didn't suppose there was," said Plunkett mildly. "He'll do by any other name." "Besides myself," said Bridger, "there are only two Americans on Ratona Bob Reeves and Henry Morgan." "The man I want sells cocoanuts," suggested Plunkett.
Wherefore, there was rivalry among the barefoot youth of Ratona, and many fell victims to the softly blown conch shells of sloops which, as they enter harbour, sound surprisingly like a distant steamer's signal. And some could name you the vessel when its call, in your duller ears, sounded no louder than the sigh of the wind through the branches of the cocoanut palms.
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.
He who first heard and made oral proclamation concerning the toot of an approaching steamer's whistle, and correctly named the steamer, was a small hero in Ratona until the next steamer came.
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.
And so I cornered Bridger in a place where they have artificial palms and wine; and he told me the story which is here in my words and on his responsibility. One afternoon at three o'clock, on the island of Ratona, a boy raced along the beach screaming, "Pajaro, ahoy!" Thus he made known the keenness of his hearing and the justice of his discrimination in pitch.
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.
Not many days ago my old friend from the tropics, J. P. Bridger, United States consul on the island of Ratona, was in the city. We had wassail and jubilee and saw the Flatiron building, and missed seeing the Bronxless menagerie by about a couple of nights. And then, at the ebb tide, we were walking up a street that parallels and parodies Broadway.
"It's a new theory," said Bridger, "that I picked up down in Ratona. I've been gathering support for it as I knock about. The world isn't ripe for it yet, but well I'll tell you; and then you run your mind back along the people you've known and see what you make of it."
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