Gentlefolk liked to claim that horsemanship was a noble art. If that were true, then half of the renegadoes on the beach at Port Marques were bastard sons of Dukes and Princes. New Spain bred horses the way London bred fleas, and many of these mulattoes and mestizoes could ride like cavaliers, even bareback. Jack of course was the last man on earth who’d ever believe that riding well was a sign of superior breeding. But he did know that riding badly was its own punishment, and that spirited horses could smell fools and poseurs from a mile away. Some of the Port Marques crowd would entertain themselves by roping wild beach-mustangs and riding them up and down the sand, forcing them against their will to gallop into breaking waves. From a musket-shot away Jack could see the white teeth of those riders as they laughed, and later on, as they gathered around driftwood-fires to eat the food of the country (maize flat-bread wrapped around meager helpings of beans and spicy stews), he would seek those men out and try to learn something of them, and he would ply them with rum to see if they had a weakness for liquor. Of all of these, the best man, in Jack’s opinion, was an African named Tomba, a member of Amboe’s band. Tomba was not a refuse slave; he had escaped from a sugar plantation in Jamaica. The scars on his back confirmed part of his story, which was that he’d fled to avoid being beaten to death by an overseer. The time he’d spent on the plantation, and at the English settlement on Haulover Creek, had given Tomba some knowledge of English, and he spent several long evenings sitting by the fire with Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe talking about what sons of bitches Englishmen were in general.