“Yuh three are gone ta wait, caaz I got somethin’ ta say that bears listenin’.” Cudlip slipped around the counter and, his arms spread wide, fluttered his fingers to summon them closer. “The young signtist best listen real good. Long time ago, before I was the businessman I am naow, I was bosun’s mate on a trip from Bahstun ta British Honduras ta pick up a load o’ mahogany wood. Had us some payin’ passengers, an’ one was a signtist, studied trees an’ plants an’ such things in the tropics. Smack dab the middle o’ the Gulf o’ Mexico, we hit that gale I told yuh abaout. Likes o’ which I’d never seen afore, ain’t since, and hope ta never see agin. Ran with it two whole days on bare sticks, an’ lost one anyways, the foremast.” The trader dropped his voice once again to a confidential whisper, while the zephyrs played coolly through his window. “When that storm was at its wust, I was goin’ b’low ta take my turn at the pumps. Passed the signtist’s cabin, and theah he were, daown on his knees, prayin’ like a man who’s been told on good authority that the world’s comin’ ta an end in five minutes. His sci-ince weren’t no good ta him then. ‘Oh, Lord, I beseech you, make these winds abate,’ he were sayin’ words like that. When I come up from my trick, pretty much feelin’ like I was climbin’ a mountain in a earthquake, I seen that he were still prayin’, but it still weren’t doin’ him no good, caaz there ain’t no kinder god at sea when the wind blows that haad. That ain’t blasphemin’, boys. God excuses himself from the premises, an’ I knaow that ta be true by the sound the winds makes when it gits ta blowin’ a hunnert knots. In case yuh never heah it yerselves, an’ I sure hope yuh don’t, I’ll tell you what it sounds like. Like the lamentations spoke of in the Good Book. The lamentations that’ll rise up from the earth from all the souls o’ the damned when they find out they’re damned on the Day o’ Judgment. Yuh don’t’ heah it with yer ears. Yuh heah it heah fust.…” His hand dropped to cup his crotch. “An’ it spreads from theah ta the rest o’ yer body an’ turns yer bones ta molasses an’ gits past yer bones inta yer soul till yuh feel like one o’ the damned yerself, an’ all yer sci-incin’ ain’t gone ta do yuh no good then, nor yer prayin’ neither. That was the trip when none aboard, includin’ me, fixed things right with Aunt Phrony, an’ we lost three men o’erboard and our foremast, too, an’ we limped inta Nerlins in Luzeanna, forgit British Honduras, an’ ever since then gunkholin’ ’mongst these bays and islands is as far ta sea as I’m goin’. Naow yuh take my advice and bring that tabaccer ta her. I’ll draw yuh a map.”