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He would have a drink or two on the veranda—not sipped, just gulped down with powerful suction in that hearty, healthy, fleshly way that so exasperated the half-sickly, heat-stricken men about him on their cane chairs; then with a few loud, careless words, a wave of the big arm, a cut of the whip on boot-top to stir himself, as if his legs were a part of somebody else that carried him along, and he would be gone, leaving a kind of gasping irritation behind. People did not believe in his grinning heartiness; and somehow he seemed trying to make everybody feel insignificant, and with that burly, overbearing manner and mask-like grin of his did so. In fact, he was now the big man of the island. Hundreds of cannibal blacks worked on his plantation—and they worked!

On the day that the great tombstone sat at the wharf's end and could not be budged, Seibert had ridden down for a casual look at what was going on. Presently, dismounting, he strode along the wharf and in among the babblers and loafers. Spurs jangled at the heels of his high boots, a long riding-whip swung from a wrist that was thicker than Combe's arm.