“Translation would be superfluous,” I said, drily. “I’ll take over. Old man wants you to go ashore.”

“Ashore?” his face lit up; in two short years the Second’s shore-going exploits had already passed into the realms of legend. “Let no man ever say that Wilson ignored duty’s call. Twenty minutes for a shower, shave and shake out the number ones.” “The agent’s offices are just beyond the dock gates,” I interrupted. “You can go as you are. Find out what’s happened to our latest passengers. Captain’s beginning to worry about them; if they’re not here by five o’clock he’s sailing without them. Way he’s feeling now, he’d just as soon do that. If the agent doesn’t know, tell him to find out. Fast.” Wilson left.

The sun started westering, but the heat stayed as it was. Thanks to Macdonald’s competence and uninhibited command of the Spanish language, the cargo on the quayside steadily and rapidly diminished.

Wilson returned to report no sign of our passengers. “Their baggage had arrived two days previously and, although only for five people, was enough”, Wilson said, “to fill a couple of railroad trucks.” About the passengers, the agent had been very nervous indeed. They were very important people, senor, very, very important. One of them was the most important man in the whole province of Camafuegos. A jeep had already been dispatched westwards along the coast road to look for them. It sometimes happened, the senor understood, that a car spring would go or a shock absorber snap. When Wilson had innocently inquired if this was because the revolutionary government had no money left to pay for the filling in of the enormous potholes in the roads, the agent had become even more nervous and said indignantly that it was entirely the fault of the inferior metal those perfidious Americanos used in the construction of their vehicles. Wilson said he had left with the impression that Detroit had a special assembly line exclusively devoted to turning out deliberately inferior cars destined solely for this particular corner of the Caribbean. Wilson went away.