You aren't drinking your Charlie Champers?'
'I think I'll go get myself a Tusker. Back in a minute. 'Jake rose
and moved to the door and
Gareth shook his head sadly.
'You've got taste buds like a crocodile's back. Tusker, forsooth,
when I'm offering you a vintage Charlie.' It was more for a chance to
think out his position and plan his moves than desire for beer that
made Jake seek the bar in the front room. He leaned against the
counter in the crowded room, and his mind went swiftly over what
Gareth
Swales had told him. He tried to decide how much was fact and how much
was fantasy. How the facts affected him and where, if there were
any,
the profits to himself might lie.
He had almost decided not to involve himself in the deal there were too
many thorns along that path and to go ahead with his original
intentions, selling the engines as cane-crushing units when he was made
the victim of one of those coincidences which were too neat not to be
one of the sardonic jokes of fate.
Beside him at the bar were two young men in the sober dress of clerks
or accountants. Each of them had a girl tucked under his arm and they
fondled them absentmindedly as they talked in loud assertive voices.
Jake had been too busy making his decision to follow this conversation
until a name caught his attention.
'By the way, did you hear that Anglo Sugar has gone bang?'
'No, I
don't believe it.'
'It's true. Heard it from the Master of the Court himself.
They say they've gone bust for half a million.'
'Good God that's the third big company this month.'
'It's hard times we live in. This will bring down a lot of little men
with it.' Jake agreed silently. He poured the beer into his glass,
tossed a coin on the counter and headed back for the private lounge.
They were hard times indeed, Jake thought. This was the second time in
as many months that he had been caught up in them.
The freighter on which he had arrived in Dares Salaam as chief engineer
had been seized by the sheriff of the court as surety in a bankruptcy
action. The owners had gone bust in London, and the ship had been
unable to pay off.
Jake had walked down the gang-plank with all his worldly possessions in
the kit-bag over his shoulder abandoning his claim to almost six
months' back wages, together with all his savings in the bankrupt
company's pension fund.
He had just started to shape up with the cane-crusher contract,
when once again the tidal waves of depression sweeping across the world
had swamped him. They were all going bang the big ones and the small,
and Jake Barton now found himself the owner of five armoured cars for
which there remained but a single buyer in the market.
Gareth was standing by the window, looking down to the harbor where the
lights of the anchored ships flickered across the dark waters. He
