reputation of
desiring to turn an honest penny, like myself. At any rate, everyone,
from the proudest planters to the editor of the _Buckatoro Journal_
next door, was glad of a chat with Ramon, whose knowledge of an immense
variety of things was as deep as a draw-well--and as placid.

I used to buy island produce through him, ship it to New Orleans, have
it sold, and re-import parcels of "notions," making a double profit. He
was always ready to help me, and as ready to talk, saying that he had an
immense respect for my relations, the Riegos.

That was how, at the end of my second year in the island, I had come to
talking to him. The stage should have brought a letter from Veronica,
who was to have presented Rooksby with a son and heir, but it was
unaccountably late. I had been twice to the coach office, and was making
my way desultorily back to Ramon's. He was talking to the editor of the
_Buckatoro Journal_--the man from next door--and to another who had,
whilst I walked lazily across the blazing square, ridden furiously up
to the steps of the arcade. The rider was talking to both of them with
exaggerated gestures of his arms. He had ridden off, spurring, and the
editor, a little, gleaming-eyed hunchback, had remained in the sunshine,
talking excitedly to Ramon.

I knew him well, an amusing, queer, warped, Satanic member of society,
who was a sort of nephew to the Macdonalds, and hand in glove with
all the Scotch Separationists of the island. He had started an
extraordinary, scandalous paper that, to avoid sequestration, changed
its name and offices every few issues, and was said by Loyalists, like
the Topnambos, to have an extremely bad influence.

He subsisted a good deal on the charity of people like the Macdonalds,
and I used sometimes to catch sight of him at evenfall listening to Mrs.
Macdonald; he would be sitting beside her hammock on the veranda, his
head very much down on his breast, very much on one side, and his great
hump portending over his little white face, and ruffling up his ragged
black hair. Mrs. Macdonald clacked all the scandal of the Vale, and the
_Buckatoro Journal_ got the benefit of it all, with adornments.

For the last month or so the Journal had been more than usually
effective, and it was only because Rowley was preparing to confound his
traducers by the boat attack on Rio Medio, that a warrant had not come
against David. When I saw him talking to Ramon, I imagined that the
rider mus