“No. I just wanted to thank you because—well, thanks. That’s all.”

The man said nothing.

“You know where the Tin Pot Arms Hotel is?” Clinton asked.

“The end of the street. On the water.”

The other young men had moved in closer. They seemed to want to know everything that took place in front of Pepito’s. Clinton glanced quickly at them, and then his eyes returned to the dark man who had given him the ride.

“You want somethin’ else now?” the man challenged him.

“No, but thanks for the ride.”

“Okay. Move.”

Clinton wanted to walk away, but he had been made to feel there was some challenge he had not accepted. “Look,” he said, “you give me a ride for about twenty miles or maybe even thirty, and now you act like you’re sore about something. How come?”

The man did not answer. And suddenly Clinton knew that he could not. For he belonged to this group of loiterers, and one of their unspoken rules called for strict hostility to strangers. Something in the man’s eyes had told him this; then he shrugged a shoulder and walked into Pepito’s. Clinton watched him enter the place, and a few of the men followed him inside. After one slow glance at the remaining young men, a glance that he hoped would convey, “Don’t mess with me, I’m mean as hell,” Clinton turned and walked toward the end of the street, feeling that he had dealt with his first band of pirates.

He did not hurry. He wanted to savor every step of the hundred yards that lay between himself and the Tin Pot Arms Hotel. He had thought a good deal on the bus from Cleveland—and written much in his notebook—about what this last few minutes of the trip would be. Now he tried to force the reality of it into his head, but for some reason, perhaps fatigue, his eyes saw the place without making any real contact with it. It was an enormous three-story frame building that had not been painted for a long time. There was a widow’s walk at the peak of the roof; and through the jungle garden that separated it from the street, Clinton caught brief glimpses of the once-elegant old galleries that surrounded its two lower floors. Hanging over the front steps of the place was a large tin cutout of its symbol. But there was no lettering on it, just this rusty old silhouette of a tin pot.

Now Clinton stopped walking altogether. He had studied the advisability of certain attitudes he might adopt when he actually walked into Berry-berry’s room. He had thought up ways of impressing him with the necessity for including him in the shrimp-boat partnership, certain unanswerable arguments in favor of their traveling together. In fact, he had experienced this meeting so often in his imagination that he was now at a loss as to how to manage it.

He entered the hotel and approached the desk. The clerk bore a startling resemblance to Ralph Williams, though older and more decrepit.