“I still don’t see you wearing a cap and gown,” Simon remarked.
“Not that, either. I’m too old to start that all over again. I think I did my job just the same, even without a classroom. No, I’m retired. Some years ago we were able to pick up quite a bargain in a small farm out in the hills. We rise at six and retire well before nine, and our one excitement is a weekly trip to town for shopping, golf, supper, and cinema. It’s a simple life, and we enjoy it very much... However, I can still take you to visit the Maroons, as I promised.”
“I’m still very interested,” Simon said.
The western outskirts of Kingston merged into picturesque Spanish Town, and then they were through that and out on the rambling highway.
“In fact,” said the Saint, lighting a cigarette, “I seem to keep on being reminded of the Maroons, as if Fate was determined to keep prodding me into something. Even on the plane coming in here, a few minutes before we landed, a colored fellow spoke to me, whom I’d met years ago in New York, when he was earning his way towards college by working as sparring partner with a pugilist friend of mine, and it turns out he’s on his way home, which is here — and damn if he didn’t tell me he was a Maroon.”
“What was his name?”
“Johnny... You know, I’m ashamed to say it, but that’s still all I know. Just Johnny.”
“It could be his last name,” Farnham said. “One of the leaders of the original Maroons was named Johnny.”
Simon shrugged.
“But long before that, soon after I met you, and before I left Nassau, I ran into another bloke from Jamaica. Name of Jerry Dugdale.”
“I remember him. He was in the police here.”
“That’s the guy. He repeated just what you’d told me, almost in the very same words, about how the Maroons had an ancient Treaty which gave them the right to make their own laws and set up their own government. Furthermore, he told me that once upon a time he was wanting to chat with a couple of natives about a slight case of murder, and he got word that they’d taken off for the Maroon country, so he went in to look for them, and the Maroon boss man complained to the Governor, and the Governor had Jerry on the carpet and chewed him out for violating their Treaty rights and almost making an international incident.”
“It’s quite possible,” Farnham said. “The Maroons are very touchy about their privileges.”
“Right then,” said the Saint, “I guess I knew that this was something I had to see. A little independent state left over for a couple of centuries, right inside the island of Jamaica — that’s something I could top any tourist story with.”
“It certainly is unique, at least in the West Indies. But,” Farnham said, without taking his eyes off the road, “I hardly thought you’d be so interested in topping tourist stories. You wouldn’t perhaps have been specially intrigued by the fact that Dugdale wasn’t allowed to chase his criminals in there, would you?”
“It does give it a sort of piquant slant,” Simon admitted cheerfully.
He looked at his companion again and said, “But from the point of view of your Government, a situation like that could have problems, couldn’t it?”
“It could,” Farnham said steadily. “And before you’re much older I’ll tell you about one.”
It had taken rather a long time, so long that the Saint felt no electrifying change, only a deepening and enriched fulfillment of his faith in coincidences and the sure guiding hand of destiny.
But David Farnham seemed to feel as unhurried as destiny itself, and Simon did not press him. Now that he knew for certain that he had something to look forward to, the Saint could wait for it as long as anyone.
Presently they were in the hills, winding upwards, and Farnham was pointing out the landmarks of his demesne with unalloyed exuberance as they came into view. The house itself stood on its own hilltop, an old Jamaican planter’s house, solidly welded to the earth and mellowed in its setting with graceful age, exposed and welcoming to the four winds. As Simon unwound himself from the car and stretched his long legs, the air he breathed in was sweet and cool.
“We’re twenty-five hundred feet up,” Farnham said practically. “The ideal altitude for these latitudes.”
He kissed his wife as she came out to greet them, and she said, “I remembered that you drank Dry Sack, Simon. And I hope you’ll excuse us having dinner at sundown, but that’s how we farmers live. Anyway, we’re having codfish and ackee, which you told me you wanted to try.”
“You make me feel like a prodigal son,” said the Saint.
And after dinner, when he had cleaned his plate of ackee, that hazardous fruit which cooks up to look exactly like a dish of richly scrambled eggs, but which is deathly poison if it is plucked prematurely from the tree, he said, “And now you could sell me anywhere as a fatted calf.”
They had coffee on the verandah, and made pleasant small talk for only a short while before Ellen Farnham quietly excused herself. David filled another pipe, sitting forward with his forearms on his thighs and his head bent in complete concentration on the neat performance of the job. Simon knew that now it was coming, and let him take his time.
“Well,” Farnham said at last, “it just happens that you’re not the only chap with a coincidence. Only a few days ago the Governor asked me to go and see the Maroons. I’d have been there already, only your wire came immediately afterwards, so I put it off till you got here.”
Simon slanted a quizzical eyebrow.
“I thought you said you were all through with Government.”
“I am. But the Maroons know me, and trust me, and I can talk to them. His Excellency asked me to do it as a personal favor, and I couldn’t refuse.”
“So I gather this trip has to be made right away.”
“Tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”
Simon drew on his cigarette, and watched smoke drift out into the velvet night.
“I’m free and willing. And it’s nice of you to put off this important visit until I got here. I feel quite guilty about having kept the Maroons waiting for a cozy chat with you about the weather and the banana crop.”
Farnham extinguished a match and leaned back in aromatic comfort.
“I’m sure you know the big thing we’re all trying to cope with,” he said soberly. “In the United States, it seems to be mainly a matter of spies and fifth columnists in high places. In what’s left of our poor old Empire, we have special complications. We were imperialists before the word became an international insult, and we did a pretty good job of it, but whether or not we were ever drunk with power, we’re certainly getting the hangovers today. Among other things, we were left with a lot of subject people that we just jolly well conquered and took over in the days when that was a respectable thing for the white man to do. I don’t think we did too badly by them, as colonialism goes, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they’re a ready-made audience for the new propaganda against us. Well, we had to let India go. We’re losing Africa piece by piece, and in the part that we really thought we could hang on to, I’m sure you’ve read about all that Mau Mau business. The terrorists may be natives, but you know the encouragement is Russian. And the opportunity here isn’t so different.”
“You don’t mean you’re afraid of a kind of Mau Mau outbreak in Jamaica?”