Limekiller!

And so theyr would come at last to the Hotel Pelican, an unusual four stories high with verandahs on all four sides of it, a large yard with children playing on the defeated grass and often an odd animal penned in a corner (an anteater or a tapir calf or a peccary, it might be), and, to one side, a two-story building joined to the hotel by an arcade: the words PELICAN BAR on a signboard. And here they would turn, through the dust of the dry season or the mud of the wet (“In this country,” Peter Py'gore sometimes said, though often he didn’t say anything, “the science of drainage has not only not been perfected, it hasn’t even been suspected.”), and enter the one room dim and cool, with its eternal aroma of beer and rum and limes and country yerba. Always, always, always: here the newly- arrived foreigners would turn in with whatever National they had found to help them. Sometimes it was one National and sometimes it was another.

But it really did not matter which one. Although Colonel Peter Pygore never would even rent his house, the National got at least a drink and a dollar or two for his pains and troubles, and the foreigners anyway had as good an introduction to Old British Hidalgo as they were ever likely to get: unless they had applied directly to one of the official offices, and this, somehow, few of them managed to do.

Limekiller’s introduction to the countrv had been similar, if not the same (in fact, it was not the same). For one thing, although he had noticed, and how could he have helped noticing? the Pygore Place, standing out as it did somewhat like Queen Victoria in a muumuu, or Oueen Liliuokilani in hoopskirts — a contradiction there, of course, for although Queen Liliuokilani had worn, at least sometime, a hoopskirt, it is as sure as anything can be sure that Oueen Victoria had never worn a muumuu: would she have been amused? not at all likely — Limekiller had been fairly content with noticing and observing it from the outside. He not only did not think of buying, he did not even think of renting, it. He thought of buying a boat, and while the story of how he came, finally, to buy one, may be told, it will not be told here.

Or, at any rate, not here and now.

And, for another thing, he had been younger than the other foreigners whose fairly typical introductions we have had described. And, also, he had been then alone.

So, then, there was Limekiller. Alone. With a boat. And, wondering, as wonder we must all, at least sometimes, what next?

Legally, a license was needed for any vessel to carry any number of passengers anywhere at all for any purpose at all within the waters of the colony; but this law had not always been enforced. In fact, Jack Limekiller had a very good idea that, like so many laws, it had never been meant to be enforced, it had been meant to be enforceable. To be sure, old Royal Governor Sir Samuel Stoniecroft had been very intent on enforcing it and had done his best to do so. But his reasons, whatever they may have been, had gone with him, first into retirement, and then into the grave; and, if they had not, they had gone into some musty muniments room in the basement of Somerset house or the Old Bailey or somewhere of the sort: and might be there yet, misfiled behind a mouldering file of indictments for, say, high treason by having had carnal knowledge of the favorite of the Prince of Wales during the War of the Roses. Only one licensee from the days of Governor Stoniecroft still survived, and that was old Captain Peter Kent: and he had lost his document during Hurrican Hephsibah, or perhaps it was Celina, he was not sure, and it did not bother him. No one would ever ask for it.

Thus it was: Nationals were never vexed to show evidence of a license. Very, very offensive foreigners might even find themselves suddenly deported for not having had one. Other kinds of foreigners, well, it all depended. And Jack Limekiller felt he could have slept more soundly if he could ever figure out a pattern as to what it all depended on. But he well knew that aliens in Hidalgo might well go mad trying to find patterns in a country which did not really feel the need of them.

Fairly early in his stay there, fairly fresh from Canada and wanting to do things “right,” as right was understood in Canada, he had spent several days going from office to office in search of enlightenment which he did not find. At first he was purely puzzled: how could government officials not know the law’s of their own government? Then, later, he suspected that he was being, given the old runaround. Later than that, much later, he decided that it was nothing of the sort. No one could give him an opinion on the matter because at the time no one had any opinion on the matter. Almost every employee of Government was a National, and hence a boatman by birth: and they all knew about not rocking boats. “A license, Mr. Limekiller? To carry passengers, Mr. Limekiller? Well, Mr. Limekiller. you see, sir.