Солдаты фортуны, 1-6 глава

Soldiers of Fortune. Author: Richard Harding Davis.
***
SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
«Это так же мило с вашей стороны, чтобы прибыть рано», сказала г-жа Портер, как Элис
Лэнгам вошел в гостиную. «Я хочу попросить об одолжении Вас. Я
уверенный Вы не будете возражать. Я спросил бы одну из дебютанток, за исключением того, что
они всегда так крест, если Вы помещаете их рядом с мужчинами, они не знают
и кто не может помочь им, и таким образом, я думал, что просто спрошу Вас, Вы так
добродушный. Вы не возражаете, не так ли?»

«Я возражаю позвониться добродушный», сказала мисс Лэнгам, улыбнувшись. «Следите
что, г-жа Портер?» она спросила.

«Он - друг Джорджа», объяснила г-жа Портер, неопределенно. «Он - a
ковбой. Кажется, что он был очень гражданским Джорджу, когда он был там
стреляя в Нью-Мексико или Старой Мексике, я не помню который. Он взял
Джордж в его хижину и дал ему вещи стрелять, и все это, и теперь
он находится в Нью-Йорке с рекомендательным письмом. Это точно так же, как
Джордж. Он может быть самым невозможным видом человека, но, поскольку я сказал г-ну.
Носильщик, люди, которых я спросил, не могут жаловаться, потому что я не знаю
что-либо больше о нем, чем они. Он звонил сегодня, когда я отсутствовал
и оставленный его карту и рекомендательное письмо Джорджа, и поскольку человек имел
подведенный меня для сегодня вечером, я просто думал, что убью двух птиц одной
камень, и просит, чтобы он заполнил свое место, и он здесь. И, о, да,»
Г-жа Портер добавила, «я собираюсь поместить его рядом с Вами, Вы возражаете?»

«Если он не будет носить кожаные леггинсы и длинные шпоры, я буду возражать очень
очень», сказала мисс Лэнгам.

«Ну, это очень хорошо из Вас», мурлыкала г-жа Портер, когда она переехала.
«Он может не быть настолько плохим, в конце концов; и я поставлю Реджиналда Кинга Ваш
другая сторона, не так ли?» она спросила, делая паузу и оглядываясь.

Взгляд на лицо мисс Лэнгам, которое было одним из развлечения,
измененный сознательно, и она улыбнулась с вежливым молчаливым согласием.

«Как Вам нравится, г-жа Портер», ответила она. Она подняла брови
немного. «Я, как политики говорят, 'в руках моих друзей'».

«Полностью слишком много в руках моих друзей», она повторилась как она
отклоненный. Это было двенадцатым разом в течение той же самой зимы это
она и г-н Кинг были размещены друг рядом с другом в ужин и это
прошел вне пункта, когда она могла сказать, что он не имел значения
какие люди думали, пока она и он поняли. Это имело теперь
достигнутый, что стадия, когда она была не совсем уверена, что поняла
или его или ее. Они знали друг друга в течение очень долгого времени;
слишком долго она иногда думала для них когда-либо, чтобы вырасти, чтобы знать каждого
другой немного лучше. Но всегда был шанс, что у него был другой
сторона, та, которая не раскрыла себя, и которая она не могла
узнайте в строгой социальной среде, в которой они оба жили.
И она была более верным из этого, потому что она когда-то видела его, когда он сделал
не знают, что она была рядом, и он так отличался, что это имело
озадаченный ее и сделанный ее удивлением, если она знала настоящего Реджи Кинга вообще.

Это было при танце в студии, и некоторый французский pantomimists дал a
мало игры. Когда это было закончено, Король сидел в углу, говорящем один
из француженок, и в то время как он ждал на ней, он смеялся над нею
и в ее усилиях говорить на английском языке. Он говорил ей, как сказать
определенные фразы и не сообщение ей правильно, и она подозревала это
и обвинял его в нем, и они были rhapsodizing и восклицающий
по определенным восхитительным местам и блюда которого они оба знали в
Париж с энтузиазмом двух детей. Мисс Лэнгам проводила его
его охрана впервые и вместо несколько скучающего и умного
светский человек, он казался столь же искренним и интересующимся как мальчик.

Когда он присоединился к ней, позже, тому же вечеру, он был так же интересен как
обычный, и столь же вежливый и внимательный, как он был француженке,
но ему не значительно было интересно, и его смех был смодулирован и нет
самопроизвольный. Она задалась вопросом той ночью, и часто с тех пор,
если, в случае его просьбы, чтобы она женилась на нем, который был возможен,
и ее принятия его, который был также возможен, будет ли она
найдите его, в более близком знании семейной жизни, как увлеченного и
беззаботный с нею, поскольку он был с французским танцором. Если он
был бы, но рассматривать ее больше как товарищ и равный, и меньше как a
премьер-министр, награждающий его королевой! Она хотела что-то больше
близкий, чем уважение, которое он показал ей, и ей не нравилось
его взятие его как принятое то, что она была столь же бывалой как
самостоятельно, даже при том, что это было верно.

Она была женщиной и хотела быть любимой, несмотря на то, что она
была любима многими мужчинами - по крайней мере, это так предполагалось - и имело
отклонения от них.



1 глава.

"It is so good of you to come early," said Mrs. Porter, as Alice
Langham entered the drawing-room.  "I want to ask a favor of you.  I'm
sure you won't mind.  I would ask one of the debutantes, except that
they're always so cross if one puts them next to men they don't know
and who can't help them, and so I thought I'd just ask you, you're so
good-natured.  You don't mind, do you?"

"I mind being called good-natured," said Miss Langham, smiling. "Mind
what, Mrs. Porter?" she asked.

"He is a friend of George's," Mrs. Porter explained, vaguely. "He's a
cowboy.  It seems he was very civil to George when he was out there
shooting in New Mexico, or Old Mexico, I don't remember which.  He took
George to his hut and gave him things to shoot, and all that, and now
he is in New York with a letter of introduction.  It's just like
George.  He may be a most impossible sort of man, but, as I said to Mr.
Porter, the people I've asked can't complain, because I don't know
anything more about him than they do.  He called to-day when I was out
and left his card and George's letter of introduction, and as a man had
failed me for to-night, I just thought I would kill two birds with one
stone, and ask him to fill his place, and he's here. And, oh, yes,"
Mrs. Porter added, "I'm going to put him next to you, do you mind?"

"Unless he wears leather leggings and long spurs I shall mind very
much," said Miss Langham.

"Well, that's very nice of you," purred Mrs. Porter, as she moved away.
"He may not be so bad, after all; and I'll put Reginald King on your
other side, shall I?" she asked, pausing and glancing back.

The look on Miss Langham's face, which had been one of amusement,
changed consciously, and she smiled with polite acquiescence.

"As you please, Mrs. Porter," she answered.  She raised her eyebrows
slightly.  "I am, as the politicians say, 'in the hands of my friends.'"

"Entirely too much in the hands of my friends," she repeated, as she
turned away.  This was the twelfth time during that same winter that
she and Mr. King had been placed next to one another at dinner, and it
had passed beyond the point when she could say that it did not matter
what people thought as long as she and he understood.  It had now
reached that stage when she was not quite sure that she understood
either him or herself.  They had known each other for a very long time;
too long, she sometimes thought, for them ever to grow to know each
other any better. But there was always the chance that he had another
side, one that had not disclosed itself, and which she could not
discover in the strict social environment in which they both lived.
And she was the surer of this because she had once seen him when he did
not know that she was near, and he had been so different that it had
puzzled her and made her wonder if she knew the real Reggie King at all.

It was at a dance at a studio, and some French pantomimists gave a
little play.  When it was over, King sat in the corner talking to one
of the Frenchwomen, and while he waited on her he was laughing at her
and at her efforts to speak English.  He was telling her how to say
certain phrases and not telling her correctly, and she suspected this
and was accusing him of it, and they were rhapsodizing and exclaiming
over certain delightful places and dishes of which they both knew in
Paris with the enthusiasm of two children.  Miss Langham saw him off
his guard for the first time and instead of a somewhat bored and clever
man of the world, he appeared as sincere and interested as a boy.

When he joined her, later, the same evening, he was as entertaining as
usual, and as polite and attentive as he had been to the Frenchwoman,
but he was not greatly interested, and his laugh was modulated and not
spontaneous.  She had wondered that night, and frequently since then,
if, in the event of his asking her to marry him, which was possible,
and of her accepting him, which was also possible, whether she would
find him, in the closer knowledge of married life, as keen and
lighthearted with her as he had been with the French dancer.  If he
would but treat her more like a comrade and equal, and less like a
prime minister conferring with his queen!  She wanted something more
intimate than the deference that he showed her, and she did not like
his taking it as an accepted fact that she was as worldly-wise as
himself, even though it were true.

She was a woman and wanted to be loved, in spite of the fact that she
had been loved by many men--at least it was so supposed--and had
rejected them.

Each had offered her position, or had wanted her because she was fitted
to match his own great state, or because he was ambitious, or because
she was rich.  The man who could love her as she once believed men
could love, and who could give her something else besides approval of
her beauty and her mind, had not disclosed himself.  She had begun to
think that he never would, that he did not exist, that he was an
imagination of the playhouse and the novel.  The men whom she knew were
careful to show her that they appreciated how distinguished was her
position, and how inaccessible she was to them.  They seemed to think
that by so humbling themselves, and by emphasizing her position they
pleased her best, when it was what she wanted them to forget.  Each of
them would draw away backward, bowing and protesting that he was
unworthy to raise his eyes to such a prize, but that if she would only
stoop to him, how happy his life would be.  Sometimes they meant it
sincerely; sometimes they were gentlemanly adventurers of title, from
whom it was a business proposition, and in either case she turned
restlessly away and asked herself how long it would be before the man
would come who would pick her up on his saddle and gallop off with her,
with his arm around her waist and his horse's hoofs clattering beneath
them, and echoing the tumult in their hearts.

She had known too many great people in the world to feel impressed with
her own position at home in America; but she sometimes compared herself
to the Queen in "In a Balcony," and repeated to herself, with mock
seriousness:--

    "And you the marble statue all the time
      They praise and point at as preferred to life,
      Yet leave for the first breathing woman's cheek,
      First dancer's, gypsy's or street balladine's!"

And if it were true, she asked herself, that the man she had imagined
was only an ideal and an illusion, was not King the best of the others,
the unideal and ever-present others?  Every one else seemed to think
so.  The society they knew put them constantly together and approved.
Her people approved.  Her own mind approved, and as her heart was not
apparently ever to be considered, who could say that it did not approve
as well?  He was certainly a very charming fellow, a manly, clever
companion, and one who bore about him the evidences of distinction and
thorough breeding.  As far as family went, the Kings were as old as a
young country could expect, and Reggie King was, moreover, in spite of
his wealth, a man of action and ability.  His yacht journeyed from
continent to continent, and not merely up the Sound to Newport, and he
was as well known and welcome to the consuls along the coasts of Africa
and South America as he was at Cowes or Nice.  His books of voyages
were recognized by geographical societies and other serious bodies, who
had given him permission to put long disarrangements of the alphabet
after his name.  She liked him because she had grown to be at home with
him, because it was good to know that there was some one who would not
misunderstand her, and who, should she so indulge herself, would not
take advantage of any appeal she might make to his sympathy, who would
always be sure to do the tactful thing and the courteous thing, and
who, while he might never do a great thing, could not do an unkind one.

Miss Langham had entered the Porters' drawing-room after the greater
number of the guests had arrived, and she turned from her hostess to
listen to an old gentleman with a passion for golf, a passion in which
he had for a long time been endeavoring to interest her.  She answered
him and his enthusiasm in kind, and with as much apparent interest as
she would have shown in a matter of state.  It was her principle to be
all things to all men, whether they were great artists, great
diplomats, or great bores.  If a man had been pleading with her to
leave the conservatory and run away with him, and another had come up
innocently and announced that it was his dance, she would have said:
"Oh, is it?" with as much apparent delight as though his coming had
been the one bright hope in her life.

She was growing enthusiastic over the delights of golf and
unconsciously making a very beautiful picture of herself in her
interest and forced vivacity, when she became conscious for the first
time of a strange young man who was standing alone before the fireplace
looking at her, and frankly listening to all the nonsense she was
talking.  She guessed that he had been listening for some time, and she
also saw, before he turned his eyes quickly away, that he was
distinctly amused.  Miss Langham stopped gesticulating and lowered her
voice, but continued to keep her eyes on the face of the stranger,
whose own eyes were wandering around the room, to give her, so she
guessed, the idea that he had not been listening, but that she had
caught him at it in the moment he had first looked at her.  He was a
tall, broad-shouldered youth, with a handsome face, tanned and dyed,
either by the sun or by exposure to the wind, to a deep ruddy brown,
which contrasted strangely with his yellow hair and mustache, and with
the pallor of the other faces about him.  He was a stranger apparently
to every one present, and his bearing suggested, in consequence, that
ease of manner which comes to a person who is not only sure of himself,
but who has no knowledge of the claims and pretensions to social
distinction of those about him.  His most attractive feature was his
eyes, which seemed to observe all that was going on, not only what was
on the surface, but beneath the surface, and that not rudely or
covertly but with the frank, quick look of the trained observer.  Miss
Langham found it an interesting face to watch, and she did not look
away from it. She was acquainted with every one else in the room, and
hence she knew this must be the cowboy of whom Mrs. Porter had spoken,
and she wondered how any one who had lived the rough life of the West
could still retain the look when in formal clothes of one who was in
the habit of doing informal things in them.

Mrs. Porter presented her cowboy simply as "Mr. Clay, of whom I spoke
to you," with a significant raising of the eyebrows, and the cowboy
made way for King, who took Miss Langham in.  He looked frankly
pleased, however, when he found himself next to her again, but did not
take advantage of it throughout the first part of the dinner, during
which time he talked to the young married woman on his right, and Miss
Langham and King continued where they had left off at their last
meeting.  They knew each other well enough to joke of the way in which
they were thrown into each other's society, and, as she said, they
tried to make the best of it.  But while she spoke, Miss Langham was
continually conscious of the presence of her neighbor, who piqued her
interest and her curiosity in different ways.  He seemed to be at his
ease, and yet from the manner in which he glanced up and down the table
and listened to snatches of talk on either side of him he had the
appearance of one to whom it was all new, and who was seeing it for the
first time.

There was a jolly group at one end of the long table, and they wished
to emphasize the fact by laughing a little more hysterically at their
remarks than the humor of those witticisms seemed to justify.  A
daughter-in-law of Mrs. Porter was their leader in this, and at one
point she stopped in the middle of a story and waving her hand at the
double row of faces turned in her direction, which had been attracted
by the loudness of her voice, cried, gayly, "Don't listen.  This is for
private circulation.  It is not a jeune-fille story."  The debutantes
at the table continued talking again in steady, even tones, as though
they had not heard the remark or the first of the story, and the men
next to them appeared equally unconscious.  But the cowboy, Miss
Langham noted out of the corner of her eye, after a look of polite
surprise, beamed with amusement and continued to stare up and down the
table as though he had discovered a new trait in a peculiar and
interesting animal.  For some reason, she could not tell why, she felt
annoyed with herself and with her friends, and resented the attitude
which the new-comer assumed toward them.

"Mrs. Porter tells me that you know her son George?" she said. He did
not answer her at once, but bowed his head in assent, with a look of
interrogation, as though, so it seemed to her, he had expected her,
when she did speak, to say something less conventional.

"Yes," he replied, after a pause, "he joined us at Ayutla.  It was the
terminus of the Jalisco and Mexican Railroad then.  He came out over
the road and went in from there with an outfit after mountain lions.  I
believe he had very good sport."

"That is a very wonderful road, I am told," said King, bending forward
and introducing himself into the conversation with a nod of the head
toward Clay; "quite a remarkable feat of engineering."

"It will open up the country, I believe," assented the other,
indifferently.

"I know something of it," continued King, "because I met the men who
were putting it through at Pariqua, when we touched there in the yacht.
They shipped most of their plant to that port, and we saw a good deal
of them.  They were a very jolly lot, and they gave me a most
interesting account of their work and its difficulties."

Clay was looking at the other closely, as though he was trying to find
something back of what he was saying, but as his glance seemed only to
embarrass King he smiled freely again in assent, and gave him his full
attention.

"There are no men to-day, Miss Langham," King exclaimed, suddenly,
turning toward her, "to my mind, who lead as picturesque lives as do
civil engineers.  And there are no men whose work is as little
appreciated."

"Really?" said Miss Langham, encouragingly.

"Now those men I met," continued King, settling himself with his side
to the table, "were all young fellows of thirty or thereabouts, but
they were leading the lives of pioneers and martyrs--at least that's
what I'd call it.  They were marching through an almost unknown part of
Mexico, fighting Nature at every step and carrying civilization with
them.  They were doing better work than soldiers, because soldiers
destroy things, and these chaps were creating, and making the way
straight.  They had no banners either, nor brass bands.  They fought
mountains and rivers, and they were attacked on every side by fever and
the lack of food and severe exposure.  They had to sit down around a
camp-fire at night and calculate whether they were to tunnel a
mountain, or turn the bed of a river or bridge it.  And they knew all
the time that whatever they decided to do out there in the wilderness
meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's
country, who would some day hold them to account for them.  They
dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat
alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons.
We know nothing about them and we care less.  When their work is done
we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and
thousands of feet into the depths they have bridged, and we never give
them a thought.  They are the bravest soldiers of the present day, and
they are the least recognized.  I have forgotten their names, and you
never heard them.  But it seems to me the civil engineer, for all that,
is the chief civilizer of our century."

Miss Langham was looking ahead of her with her eyes half-closed, as
though she were going over in her mind the situation King had described.

"I never thought of that," she said.  "It sounds very fine. As you say,
the reward is so inglorious.  But that is what makes it fine."

The cowboy was looking down at the table and pulling at a flower in the
centre-piece.  He had ceased to smile.  Miss Langham turned on him
somewhat sharply, resenting his silence, and said, with a slight
challenge in her voice:--

"Do you agree, Mr. Clay," she asked, "or do you prefer the
chocolate-cream soldiers, in red coats and gold lace?"

"Oh, I don't know," the young man answered, with some slight
hesitation.  "It's a trade for each of them.  The engineer's work is
all the more absorbing, I imagine, when the difficulties are greatest.
He has the fun of overcoming them."

"You see nothing in it then," she asked, "but a source of amusement?"

"Oh, yes, a good deal more," he replied.  "A livelihood, for one thing.
I--I have been an engineer all my life.  I built that road Mr. King is
talking about."


An hour later, when Mrs. Porter made the move to go, Miss Langham rose
with a protesting sigh.  "I am so sorry," she said, "it has been most
interesting.  I never met two men who had visited so many inaccessible
places and come out whole.  You have quite inspired Mr. King, he was
never so amusing.  But I should like to hear the end of that adventure;
won't you tell it to me in the other room?"

Clay bowed.  "If I haven't thought of something more interesting in the
meantime," he said.

"What I can't understand," said King, as he moved up into Miss
Langham's place, "is how you had time to learn so much of the rest of
the world.  You don't act like a man who had spent his life in the
brush."

"How do you mean?" asked Clay, smiling--"that I don't use the wrong
forks?"

"No," laughed King, "but you told us that this was your first visit
East, and yet you're talking about England and Vienna and Voisin's.
How is it you've been there, while you have never been in New York?"

"Well, that's partly due to accident and partly to design," Clay
answered.  "You see I've worked for English and German and French
companies, as well as for those in the States, and I go abroad to make
reports and to receive instructions.  And then I'm what you call a
self-made man; that is, I've never been to college.  I've always had to
educate myself, and whenever I did get a holiday it seemed to me that I
ought to put it to the best advantage, and to spend it where
civilization was the furthest advanced--advanced, at least, in years.
When I settle down and become an expert, and demand large sums for just
looking at the work other fellows have done, then I hope to live in New
York, but until then I go where the art galleries are biggest and where
they have got the science of enjoying themselves down to the very
finest point.  I have enough rough work eight months of the year to
make me appreciate that.  So whenever I get a few months to myself I
take the Royal Mail to London, and from there to Paris or Vienna.  I
think I like Vienna the best.  The directors are generally important
people in their own cities, and they ask one about, and so, though I
hope I am a good American, it happens that I've more friends on the
Continent than in the United States."

"And how does this strike you?" asked King, with a movement of his
shoulder toward the men about the dismantled table.

"Oh, I don't know," laughed Clay.  "You've lived abroad yourself; how
does it strike you?"

Clay was the first man to enter the drawing-room.  He walked directly
away from the others and over to Miss Langham, and, taking her fan out
of her hands as though to assure himself of some hold upon her, seated
himself with his back to every one else.

"You have come to finish that story?" she said, smiling.

Miss Langham was a careful young person, and would not have encouraged
a man she knew even as well as she knew King, to talk to her through
dinner, and after it as well.  She fully recognized that because she
was conspicuous certain innocent pleasures were denied her which other
girls could enjoy without attracting attention or comment.  But Clay
interested her beyond her usual self, and the look in his eyes was a
tribute which she had no wish to put away from her.

"I've thought of something more interesting to talk about," said Clay.
"I'm going to talk about you.  You see I've known you a long time."

"Since eight o'clock?" asked Miss Langham.

"Oh, no, since your coming out, four years ago."

"It's not polite to remember so far back," she said.  "Were you one of
those who assisted at that important function?  There were so many
there I don't remember."

"No, I only read about it.  I remember it very well; I had ridden over
twelve miles for the mail that day, and I stopped half-way back to the
ranch and camped out in the shade of a rock and read all the papers and
magazines through at one sitting, until the sun went down and I
couldn't see the print.  One of the papers had an account of your
coming out in it, and a picture of you, and I wrote East to the
photographer for the original.  It knocked about the West for three
months and then reached me at Laredo, on the border between Texas and
Mexico, and I have had it with me ever since."

Miss Langham looked at Clay for a moment in silent dismay and with a
perplexed smile.

"Where is it now?" she asked at last.

"In my trunk at the hotel."

"Oh," she said, slowly.  She was still in doubt as to how to treat this
act of unconventionality.  "Not in your watch?" she said, to cover up
the pause.  "That would have been more in keeping with the rest of the
story."

The young man smiled grimly, and pulling out his watch pried back the
lid and turned it to her so that she could see a photograph inside.
The face in the watch was that of a young girl in the dress of a
fashion of several years ago.  It was a lovely, frank face, looking out
of the picture into the world kindly and questioningly, and without
fear.

"Was I once like that?" she said, lightly.  "Well, go on."

"Well," he said, with a little sigh of relief, "I became greatly
interested in Miss Alice Langham, and in her comings out and goings in,
and in her gowns.  Thanks to our having a press in the States that
makes a specialty of personalities, I was able to follow you pretty
closely, for, wherever I go, I have my papers sent after me.  I can get
along without a compass or a medicine-chest, but I can't do without the
newspapers and the magazines. There was a time when I thought you were
going to marry that Austrian chap, and I didn't approve of that.  I
knew things about him in Vienna.  And then I read of your engagement to
others--well--several others; some of them I thought worthy, and others
not.  Once I even thought of writing you about it, and once I saw you
in Paris.  You were passing on a coach.  The man with me told me it was
you, and I wanted to follow the coach in a fiacre, but he said he knew
at what hotel you were stopping, and so I let you go, but you were not
at that hotel, or at any other--at least, I couldn't find you."

"What would you have done--?" asked Miss Langham.  "Never mind," she
interrupted, "go on."

"Well, that's all," said Clay, smiling.  "That's all, at least, that
concerns you.  That is the romance of this poor young man."

"But not the only one," she said, for the sake of saying something.

"Perhaps not," answered Clay, "but the only one that counts. I always
knew I was going to meet you some day.  And now I have met you."

"Well, and now that you have met me," said Miss Langham, looking at him
in some amusement, "are you sorry?"

"No--" said Clay, but so slowly and with such consideration that Miss
Langham laughed and held her head a little higher. "Not sorry to meet
you, but to meet you in such surroundings."

"What fault do you find with my surroundings?"

"Well, these people," answered Clay, "they are so foolish, so futile.
You shouldn't be here.  There must be something else better than this.
You can't make me believe that you choose it. In Europe you could have
a salon, or you could influence statesmen.  There surely must be
something here for you to turn to as well.  Something better than
golf-sticks and salted almonds."

"What do you know of me?" said Miss Langham, steadily.  "Only what you
have read of me in impertinent paragraphs.  How do you know I am fitted
for anything else but just this?  You never spoke with me before
to-night."

"That has nothing to do with it," said Clay, quickly.  "Time is made
for ordinary people.  When people who amount to anything meet they
don't have to waste months in finding each other out. It is only the
doubtful ones who have to be tested again and again.  When I was a kid
in the diamond mines in Kimberley, I have seen the experts pick out a
perfect diamond from the heap at the first glance, and without a
moment's hesitation.  It was the cheap stones they spent most of the
afternoon over.  Suppose I HAVE only seen you to-night for the first
time; suppose I shall not see you again, which is quite likely, for I
sail tomorrow for South America--what of that?  I am just as sure of
what you are as though I had known you for years."

Miss Langham looked at him for a moment in silence.  Her beauty was so
great that she could take her time to speak.  She was not afraid of
losing any one's attention.

"And have you come out of the West, knowing me so well, just to tell me
that I am wasting myself?" she said.  "Is that all?"

"That is all," answered Clay.  "You know the things I would like to
tell you," he added, looking at her closely.

"I think I like to be told the other things best," she said, "they are
the easier to believe."

"You have to believe whatever I tell you," said Clay, smiling. The girl
pressed her hands together in her lap, and looked at him curiously.
The people about them were moving and making their farewells, and they
brought her back to the present with a start.

"I'm sorry you're going away," she said.  "It has been so odd. You come
suddenly up out of the wilderness, and set me to thinking and try to
trouble me with questions about myself, and then steal away again
without stopping to help me to settle them. Is it fair?"  She rose and
put out her hand, and he took it and held it for a moment, while they
stood looking at one another.

"I am coming back," he said, "and I will find that you have settled
them for yourself."

"Good-by," she said, in so low a tone that the people standing near
them could not hear.  "You haven't asked me for it, you know, but--I
think I shall let you keep that picture."


"Thank you," said Clay, smiling, "I meant to."

"You can keep it," she continued, turning back, "because it is not my
picture.  It is a picture of a girl who ceased to exist four years ago,
and whom you have never met.  Good-night."

Mr. Langham and Hope, his younger daughter, had been to the theatre.
The performance had been one which delighted Miss Hope, and which
satisfied her father because he loved to hear her laugh.  Mr. Langham
was the slave of his own good fortune.  By instinct and education he
was a man of leisure and culture, but the wealth he had inherited was
like an unruly child that needed his constant watching, and in keeping
it well in hand he had become a man of business, with time for nothing
else.

Alice Langham, on her return from Mrs. Porter's dinner, found him in
his study engaged with a game of solitaire, while Hope was kneeling on
a chair beside him with her elbows on the table. Mr. Langham had been
troubled with insomnia of late, and so it often happened that when
Alice returned from a ball she would find him sitting with a novel, or
his game of solitaire, and Hope, who had crept downstairs from her bed,
dozing in front of the open fire and keeping him silent company.  The
father and the younger daughter were very close to one another, and had
grown especially so since his wife had died and his son and heir had
gone to college.  This fourth member of the family was a great bond of
sympathy and interest between them, and his triumphs and escapades at
Yale were the chief subjects of their conversation. It was told by the
directors of a great Western railroad, who had come to New York to
discuss an important question with Mr. Langham, that they had been
ushered downstairs one night into his basement, where they had found
the President of the Board and his daughter Hope working out a game of
football on the billiard table.  They had chalked it off into what
corresponded to five-yard lines, and they were hurling twenty-two
chess-men across it in "flying wedges" and practising the several
tricks which young Langham had intrusted to his sister under an oath of
secrecy.  The sight filled the directors with the horrible fear that
business troubles had turned the President's mind, but after they had
sat for half an hour perched on the high chairs around the table, while
Hope excitedly explained the game to them, they decided that he was
wiser than they knew, and each left the house regretting he had no son
worthy enough to bring "that young girl" into the Far West.

"You are home early," said Mr. Langham, as Alice stood above him
pulling at her gloves.  "I thought you said you were going on to some
dance."

"I was tired," his daughter answered.

"Well, when I'm out," commented Hope, "I won't come home at eleven
o'clock.  Alice always was a quitter."

"A what?" asked the older sister.

"Tell us what you had for dinner," said Hope.  "I know it isn't nice to
ask," she added, hastily, "but I always like to know."

"I don't remember," Miss Langham answered, smiling at her father,
"except that he was very much sunburned and had most perplexing eyes."

"Oh, of course," assented Hope, "I suppose you mean by that that you
talked with some man all through dinner.  Well, I think there is a time
for everything."

"Father," interrupted Miss Langham, "do you know many engineers--I mean
do you come in contact with them through the railroads and mines you
have an interest in?  I am rather curious about them," she said,
lightly.  "They seem to be a most picturesque lot of young men."

"Engineers?  Of course," said Mr. Langham, vaguely, with the ten of
spades held doubtfully in air.  "Sometimes we have to depend upon them
altogether.  We decide from what the engineering experts tell us
whether we will invest in a thing or not."

"I don't think I mean the big men of the profession," said his
daughter, doubtfully.  "I mean those who do the rough work.  The men
who dig the mines and lay out the railroads.  Do you know any of them?"

"Some of them," said Mr. Langham, leaning back and shuffling the cards
for a new game.  "Why?"

"Did you ever hear of a Mr. Robert Clay?"

Mr. Langham smiled as he placed the cards one above the other in even
rows.  "Very often," he said.  "He sails to-morrow to open up the
largest iron deposits in South America.  He goes for the Valencia
Mining Company.  Valencia is the capital of Olancho, one of those
little republics down there."

"Do you--are you interested in that company?" asked Miss Langham,
seating herself before the fire and holding out her hands toward it.
"Does Mr. Clay know that you are?"

"Yes--I am interested in it," Mr. Langham replied, studying the cards
before him, "but I don't think Clay knows it--nobody knows it yet,
except the president and the other officers."  He lifted a card and put
it down again in some indecision.  "It's generally supposed to be
operated by a company, but all the stock is owned by one man.  As a
matter of fact, my dear children," exclaimed Mr. Langham, as he placed
a deuce of clubs upon a deuce of spades with a smile of content, "the
Valencia Mining Company is your beloved father."

"Oh," said Miss Langham, as she looked steadily into the fire.

Hope tapped her lips gently with the back of her hand to hide the fact
that she was sleepy, and nudged her father's elbow.  "You shouldn't
have put the deuce there," she said, "you should have used it to build
with on the ace."



II

A year before Mrs. Porter's dinner a tramp steamer on her way to the
capital of Brazil had steered so close to the shores of Olancho that
her solitary passenger could look into the caverns the waves had
tunnelled in the limestone cliffs along the coast. The solitary
passenger was Robert Clay, and he made a guess that the white palisades
which fringed the base of the mountains along the shore had been forced
up above the level of the sea many years before by some volcanic
action.  Olancho, as many people know, is situated on the northeastern
coast of South America, and its shores are washed by the main
equatorial current.  From the deck of a passing vessel you can obtain
but little idea of Olancho or of the abundance and tropical beauty
which lies hidden away behind the rampart of mountains on her shore.
You can see only their desolate dark-green front, and the white caves
at their base, into which the waves rush with an echoing roar, and in
and out of which fly continually thousands of frightened bats.

The mining engineer on the rail of the tramp steamer observed this
peculiar formation of the coast with listless interest, until he noted,
when the vessel stood some thirty miles north of the harbor of
Valencia, that the limestone formation had disappeared, and that the
waves now beat against the base of the mountains themselves.  There
were five of these mountains which jutted out into the ocean, and they
suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant hand clenched and lying
flat upon the surface of the water.  They extended for seven miles, and
then the caverns in the palisades began again and continued on down the
coast to the great cliffs that guard the harbor of Olancho's capital.

"The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against
those five mountains," mused the engineer, "and then they had to fall
back."  He walked to the captain's cabin and asked to look at a map of
the coast line.  "I believe I won't go to Rio," he said later in the
day; "I think I will drop off here at Valencia."

So he left the tramp steamer at that place and disappeared into the
interior with an ox-cart and a couple of pack-mules, and returned to
write a lengthy letter from the Consul's office to a Mr. Langham in the
United States, knowing he was largely interested in mines and in
mining.  "There are five mountains filled with ore," Clay wrote, "which
should be extracted by open-faced workings.  I saw great masses of red
hematite lying exposed on the side of the mountain, only waiting a pick
and shovel, and at one place there were five thousand tons in plain
sight.  I should call the stuff first-class Bessemer ore, running about
sixty-three per cent metallic iron.  The people know it is there, but
have no knowledge of its value, and are too lazy to ever work it
themselves.  As to transportation, it would only be necessary to run a
freight railroad twenty miles along the sea-coast to the harbor of
Valencia and dump your ore from your own pier into your own vessels.
It would not, I think, be possible to ship direct from the mines
themselves, even though, as I say, the ore runs right down into the
water, because there is no place at which it would be safe for a large
vessel to touch.  I will look into the political side of it and see
what sort of a concession I can get for you.  I should think ten per
cent of the output would satisfy them, and they would, of course, admit
machinery and plant free of duty."

Six months after this communication had arrived in New York City, the
Valencia Mining Company was formally incorporated, and a man named Van
Antwerp, with two hundred workmen and a half-dozen assistants, was sent
South to lay out the freight railroad, to erect the dumping-pier, and
to strip the five mountains of their forests and underbrush.  It was
not a task for a holiday, but a stern, difficult, and perplexing
problem, and Van Antwerp was not quite the man to solve it.  He was
stubborn, self-confident, and indifferent by turns.  He did not depend
upon his lieutenants, but jealously guarded his own opinions from the
least question or discussion, and at every step he antagonized the
easy-going people among whom he had come to work.  He had no patience
with their habits of procrastination, and he was continually offending
their lazy good-nature and their pride.  He treated the rich planters,
who owned the land between the mines and the harbor over which the
freight railroad must run, with as little consideration as he showed
the regiment of soldiers which the Government had farmed out to the
company to serve as laborers in the mines.  Six months after Van
Antwerp had taken charge at Valencia, Clay, who had finished the
railroad in Mexico, of which King had spoken, was asked by telegraph to
undertake the work of getting the ore out of the mountains he had
discovered, and shipping it North.  He accepted the offer and was given
the title of General Manager and Resident Director, and an enormous
salary, and was also given to understand that the rough work of
preparation had been accomplished, and that the more important service
of picking up the five mountains and putting them in fragments into
tramp steamers would continue under his direction.  He had a letter of
recall for Van Antwerp, and a letter of introduction to the Minister of
Mines and Agriculture.  Further than that he knew nothing of the work
before him, but he concluded, from the fact that he had been paid the
almost prohibitive sum he had asked for his services, that it must be
important, or that he had reached that place in his career when he
could stop actual work and live easily, as an expert, on the work of
others.

Clay rolled along the coast from Valencia to the mines in a
paddle-wheeled steamer that had served its usefulness on the
Mississippi, and which had been rotting at the levees in New Orleans,
when Van Antwerp had chartered it to carry tools and machinery to the
mines and to serve as a private launch for himself.  It was a choice
either of this steamer and landing in a small boat, or riding along the
line of the unfinished railroad on horseback.  Either route consumed
six valuable hours, and Clay, who was anxious to see his new field of
action, beat impatiently upon the rail of the rolling tub as it
wallowed in the sea.

He spent the first three days after his arrival at the mines in the
mountains, climbing them on foot and skirting their base on horseback,
and sleeping where night overtook him.  Van Antwerp did not accompany
him on his tour of inspection through the mines, but delegated that
duty to an engineer named MacWilliams, and to Weimer, the United States
Consul at Valencia, who had served the company in many ways and who was
in its closest confidence.

For three days the men toiled heavily over fallen trunks and trees,
slippery with the moss of centuries, or slid backward on the rolling
stones in the waterways, or clung to their ponies' backs to dodge the
hanging creepers.  At times for hours together they walked in single
file, bent nearly double, and seeing nothing before them but the
shining backs and shoulders of the negroes who hacked out the way for
them to go.  And again they would come suddenly upon a precipice, and
drink in the soft cool breath of the ocean, and look down thousands of
feet upon the impenetrable green under which they had been crawling,
out to where it met the sparkling surface of the Caribbean Sea.  It was
three days of unceasing activity while the sun shone, and of anxious
questionings around the camp-fire when the darkness fell, and when
there were no sounds on the mountain-side but that of falling water in
a distant ravine or the calls of the night-birds.

On the morning of the fourth day Clay and his attendants returned to
camp and rode to where the men had just begun to blast away the sloping
surface of the mountain.

As Clay passed between the zinc sheds and palm huts of the
soldier-workmen, they came running out to meet him, and one, who seemed
to be a leader, touched his bridle, and with his straw sombrero in his
hand begged for a word with el Senor the Director.

The news of Clay's return had reached the opening, and the throb of the
dummy-engines and the roar of the blasting ceased as the
assistant-engineers came down the valley to greet the new manager.
They found him seated on his horse gazing ahead of him, and listening
to the story of the soldier, whose fingers, as he spoke, trembled in
the air, with all the grace and passion of his Southern nature, while
back of him his companions stood humbly, in a silent chorus, with
eager, supplicating eyes.  Clay answered the man's speech curtly, with
a few short words, in the Spanish patois in which he had been
addressed, and then turned and smiled grimly upon the expectant group
of engineers.  He kept them waiting for some short space, while he
looked them over carefully, as though he had never seen them before.

"Well, gentlemen," he said, "I'm glad to have you here all together.  I
am only sorry you didn't come in time to hear what this fellow has had
to say.  I don't as a rule listen that long to complaints, but he told
me what I have seen for myself and what has been told me by others.  I
have been here three days now, and I assure you, gentlemen, that my
easiest course would be to pack up my things and go home on the next
steamer.  I was sent down here to take charge of a mine in active
operation, and I find--what?  I find that in six months you have done
almost nothing, and that the little you have condescended to do has
been done so badly that it will have to be done over again; that you
have not only wasted a half year of time--and I can't tell how much
money--but that you have succeeded in antagonizing all the people on
whose good-will we are absolutely dependent; you have allowed your
machinery to rust in the rain, and your workmen to rot with sickness.
You have not only done nothing, but you haven't a blue print to show me
what you meant to do.  I have never in my life come across laziness and
mismanagement and incompetency upon such a magnificent and reckless
scale.  You have not built the pier, you have not opened the freight
road, you have not taken out an ounce of ore.  You know more of
Valencia than you know of these mines; you know it from the Alameda to
the Canal.  You can tell me what night the band plays in the Plaza, but
you can't give me the elevation of one of these hills.  You have spent
your days on the pavements in front of caf;s, and your nights in
dance-halls, and you have been drawing salaries every month.  I've more
respect for these half-breeds that you've allowed to starve in this
fever-bed than I have for you.  You have treated them worse than they'd
treat a dog, and if any of them die, it's on your heads.  You have put
them in a fever-camp which you have not even taken the trouble to
drain.  Your commissariat is rotten, and you have let them drink all
the rum they wanted.  There is not one of you--"

The group of silent men broke, and one of them stepped forward and
shook his forefinger at Clay.

"No man can talk to me like that," he said, warningly, "and think I'll
work under him.  I resign here and now."

"You what--" cried Clay, "you resign?"

He whirled his horse round with a dig of his spur and faced them.

"How dare you talk of resigning?  I'll pack the whole lot of you back
to New York on the first steamer, if I want to, and I'll give you such
characters that you'll be glad to get a job carrying a transit.  You're
in no position to talk of resigning yet--not one of you.  Yes," he
added, interrupting himself, "one of you is MacWilliams, the man who
had charge of the railroad.  It's no fault of his that the road's not
working.  I understand that he couldn't get the right of way from the
people who owned the land, but I have seen what he has done, and his
plans, and I apologize to him--to MacWilliams.  As for the rest of you,
I'll give you a month's trial.  It will be a month before the next
steamer could get here anyway, and I'll give you that long to redeem
yourselves.  At the end of that time we will have another talk, but you
are here now only on your good behavior and on my sufferance.
Good-morning."

As Clay had boasted, he was not the man to throw up his position
because he found the part he had to play was not that of leading man,
but rather one of general utility, and although it had been several
years since it had been part of his duties to oversee the setting up of
machinery, and the policing of a mining camp, he threw himself as
earnestly into the work before him as though to show his subordinates
that it did not matter who did the work, so long as it was done.  The
men at first were sulky, resentful, and suspicious, but they could not
long resist the fact that Clay was doing the work of five men and five
different kinds of work, not only without grumbling, but apparently
with the keenest pleasure.

He conciliated the rich coffee planters who owned the land which he
wanted for the freight road by calls of the most formal state and
dinners of much less formality, for he saw that the iron mine had its
social as well as its political side.  And with this fact in mind, he
opened the railroad with great ceremony, and much music and feasting,
and the first piece of ore taken out of the mine was presented to the
wife of the Minister of the Interior in a cluster of diamonds, which
made the wives of the other members of the Cabinet regret that their
husbands had not chosen that portfolio.  Six months followed of hard,
unremitting work, during which time the great pier grew out into the
bay from MacWilliams' railroad, and the face of the first mountain was
scarred and torn of its green, and left in mangled nakedness, while the
ringing of hammers and picks, and the racking blasts of dynamite, and
the warning whistles of the dummy-engines drove away the accumulated
silence of centuries.

It had been a long uphill fight, and Clay had enjoyed it mightily.  Two
unexpected events had contributed to help it.  One was the arrival in
Valencia of young Teddy Langham, who came ostensibly to learn the
profession of which Clay was so conspicuous an example, and in reality
to watch over his father's interests.  He was put at Clay's elbow, and
Clay made him learn in spite of himself, for he ruled him and
MacWilliams of both of whom he was very fond, as though, so they
complained, they were the laziest and the most rebellious members of
his entire staff.  The second event of importance was the announcement
made one day by young Langham that his father's physician had ordered
rest in a mild climate, and that he and his daughters were coming in a
month to spend the winter in Valencia, and to see how the son and heir
had developed as a man of business.

The idea of Mr. Langham's coming to visit Olancho to inspect his new
possessions was not a surprise to Clay.  It had occurred to him as
possible before, especially after the son had come to join them there.
The place was interesting and beautiful enough in itself to justify a
visit, and it was only a ten days' voyage from New York.  But he had
never considered the chance of Miss Langham's coming, and when that was
now not only possible but a certainty, he dreamed of little else.  He
lived as earnestly and toiled as indefatigably as before, but the place
was utterly transformed for him.  He saw it now as she would see it
when she came, even while at the same time his own eyes retained their
point of view.  It was as though he had lengthened the focus of a
glass, and looked beyond at what was beautiful and picturesque, instead
of what was near at hand and practicable.  He found himself smiling
with anticipation of her pleasure in the orchids hanging from the dead
trees, high above the opening of the mine, and in the parrots hurling
themselves like gayly colored missiles among the vines; and he
considered the harbor at night with its colored lamps floating on the
black water as a scene set for her eyes.  He planned the dinners that
he would give in her honor on the balcony of the great restaurant in
the Plaza on those nights when the band played, and the senoritas
circled in long lines between admiring rows of officers and caballeros.
And he imagined how, when the ore-boats had been filled and his work
had slackened, he would be free to ride with her along the rough
mountain roads, between magnificent pillars of royal palms, or to
venture forth in excursions down the bay, to explore the caves and to
lunch on board the rolling paddle-wheel steamer, which he would have re
painted and gilded for her coming.  He pictured himself acting as her
guide over the great mines, answering her simple questions about the
strange machinery, and the crew of workmen, and the local government by
which he ruled two thousand men.  It was not on account of any personal
pride in the mines that he wanted her to see them, it was not because
he had discovered and planned and opened them that he wished to show
them to her, but as a curious spectacle that he hoped would give her a
moment's interest.

But his keenest pleasure was when young Langham suggested that they
should build a house for his people on the edge of the hill that jutted
out over the harbor and the great ore pier.  If this were done, Langham
urged, it would be possible for him to see much more of his family than
he would be able to do were they installed in the city, five miles away.

"We can still live in the office at this end of the railroad," the boy
said, "and then we shall have them within call at night when we get
back from work; but if they are in Valencia, it will take the greater
part of the evening going there and all of the night getting back, for
I can't pass that club under three hours. It will keep us out of
temptation."

"Yes, exactly," said Clay, with a guilty smile, "it will keep us out of
temptation."

So they cleared away the underbrush, and put a double force of men to
work on what was to be the most beautiful and comfortable bungalow on
the edge of the harbor.  It had blue and green and white tiles on the
floors, and walls of bamboo, and a red roof of curved tiles to let in
the air, and dragons' heads for water-spouts, and verandas as broad as
the house itself.  There was an open court in the middle hung with
balconies looking down upon a splashing fountain, and to decorate this
patio, they levied upon people for miles around for tropical plants and
colored mats and awnings.  They cut down the trees that hid the view of
the long harbor leading from the sea into Valencia, and planted a
rampart of other trees to hide the iron-ore pier, and they sodded the
raw spots where the men had been building, until the place was as
completely transformed as though a fairy had waved her wand above it.

It was to be a great surprise, and they were all--Clay, MacWilliams,
and Langham--as keenly interested in it as though each were preparing
it for his honeymoon.  They would be walking together in Valencia when
one would say, "We ought to have that for the house," and without
question they would march into the shop together and order whatever
they fancied to be sent out to the house of the president of the mines
on the hill.  They stocked it with wine and linens, and hired a volante
and six horses, and fitted out the driver with a new pair of boots that
reached above his knees, and a silver jacket and a sombrero that was so
heavy with braid that it flashed like a halo about his head in the
sunlight, and he was ordered not to wear it until the ladies came,
under penalty of arrest.  It delighted Clay to find that it was only
the beautiful things and the fine things of his daily routine that
suggested her to him, as though she could not be associated in his mind
with anything less worthy, and he kept saying to himself, "She will
like this view from the end of the terrace," and "This will be her
favorite walk," or "She will swing her hammock here," and "I know she
will not fancy the rug that Weimer chose."

While this fairy palace was growing the three men lived as roughly as
before in the wooden hut at the terminus of the freight road, three
hundred yards below the house, and hidden from it by an impenetrable
rampart of brush and Spanish bayonet. There was a rough road leading
from it to the city, five miles away, which they had extended still
farther up the hill to the Palms, which was the name Langham had
selected for his father's house.  And when it was finally finished,
they continued to live under the corrugated zinc roof of their office
building, and locking up the Palms, left it in charge of a gardener and
a watchman until the coming of its rightful owners.

It had been a viciously hot, close day, and even now the air came in
sickening waves, like a blast from the engine-room of a steamer, and
the heat lightning played round the mountains over the harbor and
showed the empty wharves, and the black outlines of the steamers, and
the white front of the Custom-House, and the long half-circle of
twinkling lamps along the quay. MacWilliams and Langham sat panting on
the lower steps of the office-porch considering whether they were too
lazy to clean themselves and be rowed over to the city, where, as it
was Sunday night, was promised much entertainment.  They had been for
the last hour trying to make up their minds as to this, and appealing
to Clay to stop work and decide for them.  But he sat inside at a table
figuring and writing under the green shade of a student's lamp and made
no answer.  The walls of Clay's office were of unplaned boards,
bristling with splinters, and hung with blue prints and outline maps of
the mine.  A gaudily colored portrait of Madame la Presidenta, the
noble and beautiful woman whom Alvarez, the President of Olancho, had
lately married in Spain, was pinned to the wall above the table.  This
table, with its green oil-cloth top, and the lamp, about which winged
insects beat noisily, and an earthen water-jar--from which the water
dripped as regularly as the ticking of a clock--were the only articles
of furniture in the office.  On a shelf at one side of the door lay the
men's machetes, a belt of cartridges, and a revolver in a holster.

Clay rose from the table and stood in the light of the open door,
stretching himself gingerly, for his joints were sore and stiff with
fording streams and climbing the surfaces of rocks. The red ore and
yellow mud of the mines were plastered over his boots and
riding-breeches, where he had stood knee-deep in the water, and his
shirt stuck to him like a wet bathing-suit, showing his ribs when he
breathed and the curves of his broad chest.  A ring of burning paper
and hot ashes fell from his cigarette to his breast and burnt a hole
through the cotton shirt, and he let it lie there and watched it burn
with a grim smile.

"I wanted to see," he explained, catching the look of listless
curiosity in MacWilliams's eye, "whether there was anything hotter than
my blood.  It's racing around like boiling water in a pot."

"Listen," said Langham, holding up his hand.  "There goes the call for
prayers in the convent, and now it's too late to go to town.  I am
glad, rather.  I'm too tired to keep awake, and besides, they don't
know how to amuse themselves in a civilized way--at least not in my
way.  I wish I could just drop in at home about now; don't you,
MacWilliams?  Just about this time up in God's country all the people
are at the theatre, or they've just finished dinner and are sitting
around sipping cool green mint, trickling through little lumps of ice.
What I'd like--" he stopped and shut one eye and gazed, with his head
on one side, at the unimaginative MacWilliams--"what I'd like to do
now," he continued, thoughtfully, "would be to sit in the front row at
a comic opera, ON THE AISLE.  The prima donna must be very, very
beautiful, and sing most of her songs at me, and there must be three
comedians, all good, and a chorus entirely composed of girls.  I never
could see why they have men in the chorus, anyway.  No one ever looks
at them.  Now that's where I'd like to be.  What would you like,
MacWilliams?"

MacWilliams was a type with which Clay was intimately familiar, but to
the college-bred Langham he was a revelation and a joy. He came from
some little town in the West, and had learned what he knew of
engineering at the transit's mouth, after he had first served his
apprenticeship by cutting sage-brush and driving stakes.  His life had
been spent in Mexico and Central America, and he spoke of the home he
had not seen in ten years with the aggressive loyalty of the confirmed
wanderer, and he was known to prefer and to import canned corn and
canned tomatoes in preference to eating the wonderful fruits of the
country, because the former came from the States and tasted to him of
home.  He had crowded into his young life experiences that would have
shattered the nerves of any other man with a more sensitive conscience
and a less happy sense of humor; but these same experiences had only
served to make him shrewd and self-confident and at his ease when the
occasion or difficulty came.

He pulled meditatively on his pipe and considered Langham's question
deeply, while Clay and the younger boy sat with their arms upon their
knees and waited for his decision in thoughtful silence.

"I'd like to go to the theatre, too," said MacWilliams, with an air as
though to show that he also was possessed of artistic tastes.  "I'd
like to see a comical chap I saw once in '80--oh, long ago--before I
joined the P. Q. & M.  He WAS funny.  His name was Owens; that was his
name, John E. Owens--"

"Oh, for heaven's sake, MacWilliams," protested Langham, in dismay;
"he's been dead for five years."

"Has he?" said MacWilliams, thoughtfully.  "Well--" he concluded,
unabashed, "I can't help that, he's the one I'd like to see best."

"You can have another wish, Mac, you know," urged Langham, "can't he,
Clay?"

Clay nodded gravely, and MacWilliams frowned again in thought. "No," he
said after an effort, "Owens, John E. Owens; that's the one I want to
see."

"Well, now I want another wish, too," said Langham.  "I move we can
each have two wishes. I wish--"

"Wait until I've had mine," said Clay.  "You've had one turn. I want to
be in a place I know in Vienna.  It's not hot like this, but cool and
fresh.  It's an open, out-of-door concert-garden, with hundreds of
colored lights and trees, and there's always a breeze coming through.
And Eduard Strauss, the son, you know, leads the orchestra there, and
they play nothing but waltzes, and he stands in front of them, and
begins by raising himself on his toes, and then he lifts his shoulders
gently--and then sinks back again and raises his baton as though he
were drawing the music out after it, and the whole place seems to rock
and move.  It's like being picked up and carried on the deck of a yacht
over great waves; and all around you are the beautiful Viennese women
and those tall Austrian officers in their long, blue coats and flat
hats and silver swords.  And there are cool drinks--" continued Clay,
with his eyes fixed on the coming storm--"all sorts of cool drinks--in
high, thin glasses, full of ice, all the ice you want--"

"Oh, drop it, will you?" cried Langham, with a shrug of his damp
shoulders.  "I can't stand it.  I'm parching."

"Wait a minute," interrupted MacWilliams, leaning forward and looking
into the night.  "Some one's coming."  There was a sound down the road
of hoofs and the rattle of the land-crabs as they scrambled off into
the bushes, and two men on horseback came suddenly out of the darkness
and drew rein in the light from the open door.  The first was General
Mendoza, the leader of the Opposition in the Senate, and the other, his
orderly.  The General dropped his Panama hat to his knee and bowed in
the saddle three times.

"Good-evening, your Excellency," said Clay, rising.  "Tell that peon to
get my coat, will you?" he added, turning to Langham.  Langham clapped
his hands, and the clanging of a guitar ceased, and their servant and
cook came out from the back of the hut and held the General's horse
while he dismounted.  "Wait until I get you a chair," said Clay.
"You'll find those steps rather bad for white duck."

"I am fortunate in finding you at home," said the officer, smiling, and
showing his white teeth.  "The telephone is not working.  I tried at
the club, but I could not call you."

"It's the storm, I suppose," Clay answered, as he struggled into his
jacket.  "Let me offer you something to drink."  He entered the house,
and returned with several bottles on a tray and a bundle of cigars.
The Spanish-American poured himself out a glass of water, mixing it
with Jamaica rum, and said, smiling again, "It is a saying of your
countrymen that when a man first comes to Olancho he puts a little rum
into his water, and that when he is here some time he puts a little
water in his rum."

"Yes," laughed Clay.  "I'm afraid that's true."

There was a pause while the men sipped at their glasses, and looked at
the horses and the orderly.  The clanging of the guitar began again
from the kitchen.  "You have a very beautiful view here of the harbor,
yes," said Mendoza.  He seemed to enjoy the pause after his ride, and
to be in no haste to begin on the object of his errand.  MacWilliams
and Langham eyed each other covertly, and Clay examined the end of his
cigar, and they all waited.

"And how are the mines progressing, eh?" asked the officer, genially.
"You find much good iron in them, they tell me."

"Yes, we are doing very well," Clay assented; "it was difficult at
first, but now that things are in working order, we are getting out
about ten thousand tons a month.  We hope to increase that soon to
twenty thousand when the new openings are developed and our shipping
facilities are in better shape."

"So much!" exclaimed the General, pleasantly.

"Of which the Government of my country is to get its share of ten per
cent--one thousand tons!  It is munificent!"  He laughed and shook his
head slyly at Clay, who smiled in dissent.

"But you see, sir," said Clay, "you cannot blame us.  The mines have
always been there, before this Government came in, before the Spaniards
were here, before there was any Government at all, but there was not
the capital to open them up, I suppose, or--and it needed a certain
energy to begin the attack.  Your people let the chance go, and, as it
turned out, I think they were very wise in doing so.  They get ten per
cent of the output. That's ten per cent on nothing, for the mines
really didn't exist, as far as you were concerned, until we came, did
they? They were just so much waste land, and they would have remained
so.  And look at the price we paid down before we cut a tree. Three
millions of dollars; that's a good deal of money.  It will be some time
before we realize anything on that investment."

Mendoza shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.  "I will be frank
with you," he said, with the air of one to whom dissimulation is
difficult.  "I come here to-night on an unpleasant errand, but it is
with me a matter of duty, and I am a soldier, to whom duty is the
foremost ever.  I have come to tell you, Mr. Clay, that we, the
Opposition, are not satisfied with the manner in which the Government
has disposed of these great iron deposits.  When I say not satisfied,
my dear friend, I speak most moderately.  I should say that we are
surprised and indignant, and we are determined the wrong it has done
our country shall be righted.  I have the honor to have been chosen to
speak for our party on this most important question, and on next
Tuesday, sir," the General stood up and bowed, as though he were before
a great assembly, "I will rise in the Senate and move a vote of want of
confidence in the Government for the manner in which it has given away
the richest possessions in the storehouse of my country, giving it not
only to aliens, but for a pittance, for a share which is not a share,
but a bribe, to blind the eyes of the people.  It has been a shameful
bargain, and I cannot say who is to blame; I accuse no one.  But I
suspect, and I will demand an investigation; I will demand that the
value not of one-tenth, but of one-half of all the iron that your
company takes out of Olancho shall be paid into the treasury of the
State.  And I come to you to-night, as the Resident Director, to inform
you beforehand of my intention.  I do not wish to take you unprepared.
I do not blame your people; they are business men, they know how to
make good bargains, they get what they best can.  That is the rule of
trade, but they have gone too far, and I advise you to communicate with
your people in New York and learn what they are prepared to offer
now--now that they have to deal with men who do not consider their own
interests but the interests of their country."

Mendoza made a sweeping bow and seated himself, frowning dramatically,
with folded arms.  His voice still hung in the air, for he had spoken
as earnestly as though he imagined himself already standing in the hall
of the Senate championing the cause of the people.

MacWilliams looked up at Clay from where he sat on the steps below him,
but Clay did not notice him, and there was no sound, except the quick
sputtering of the nicotine in Langham's pipe, at which he pulled
quickly, and which was the only outward sign the boy gave of his
interest.  Clay shifted one muddy boot over the other and leaned back
with his hands stuck in his belt.

"Why didn't you speak of this sooner?" he asked.

"Ah, yes, that is fair," said the General, quickly.  "I know that it is
late, and I regret it, and I see that we cause you inconvenience; but
how could I speak sooner when I was ignorant of what was going on?  I
have been away with my troops.  I am a soldier first, a politician
after.  During the last year I have been engaged in guarding the
frontier.  No news comes to a General in the field moving from camp to
camp and always in the saddle; but I may venture to hope, sir, that
news has come to you of me?"

Clay pressed his lips together and bowed his head.

"We have heard of your victories, General, yes," he said; "and on your
return you say you found things had not been going to your liking?"

"That is it," assented the other, eagerly.  "I find that indignation
reigns on every side.  I find my friends complaining of the railroad
which you run across their land.  I find that fifteen hundred soldiers
are turned into laborers, with picks and spades, working by the side of
negroes and your Irish; they have not been paid their wages, and they
have been fed worse than though they were on the march; sickness and--"

Clay moved impatiently and dropped his boot heavily on the porch.

"That was true at first," he interrupted, "but it is not so now.  I
should be glad, General, to take you over the men's quarters at any
time.  As for their not having been paid, they were never paid by their
own Government before they came to us and for the same reason, because
the petty officers kept back the money, just as they have always done.
But the men are paid now.  However, this is not of the most importance.
Who is it that complains of the terms of our concession?"

"Every one!" exclaimed Mendoza, throwing out his arms, "and they ask,
moreover, this: they ask why, if this mine is so rich, why was not the
stock offered here to us in this country?  Why was it not put on the
market, that any one might buy?  We have rich men in Olancho, why
should not they benefit first of all others by the wealth of their own
lands?  But no! we are not asked to buy.  All the stock is taken in New
York, no one benefits but the State, and it receives only ten per cent.
It is monstrous!"

"I see," said Clay, gravely.  "That had not occurred to me before.
They feel they have been slighted.  I see."  He paused for a moment as
if in serious consideration.  "Well," he added, "that might be
arranged."

He turned and jerked his head toward the open door.  "If you boys mean
to go to town to-night, you'd better be moving," he said.  The two men
rose together and bowed silently to their guest.

"I should like if Mr. Langham would remain a moment with us," said
Mendoza, politely.  "I understand that it is his father who controls
the stock of the company.  If we discuss any arrangement it might be
well if he were here."

Clay was sitting with his chin on his breast, and he did not look up,
nor did the young man turn to him for any prompting.  "I'm not down
here as my father's son," he said, "I am an employee of Mr. Clay's.  He
represents the company.  Good-night, sir."

"You think, then," said Clay, "that if your friends were given an
opportunity to subscribe to the stock they would feel less resentful
toward us?  They would think it was fairer to all?"

"I know it," said Mendoza; "why should the stock go out of the country
when those living here are able to buy it?"

"Exactly," said Clay, "of course.  Can you tell me this, General?  Are
the gentlemen who want to buy stock in the mine the same men who are in
the Senate?  The men who are objecting to the terms of our concession?"

"With a few exceptions they are the same men."

Clay looked out over the harbor at the lights of the town, and the
General twirled his hat around his knee and gazed with appreciation at
the stars above him.

"Because if they are," Clay continued, "and they succeed in getting our
share cut down from ninety per cent to fifty per cent, they must see
that the stock would be worth just forty per cent less than it is now."

"That is true," assented the other.  "I have thought of that, and if
the Senators in Opposition were given a chance to subscribe, I am sure
they would see that it is better wisdom to drop their objections to the
concession, and as stockholders allow you to keep ninety per cent of
the output.  And, again," continued Mendoza, "it is really better for
the country that the money should go to its people than that it should
be stored up in the vaults of the treasury, when there is always the
danger that the President will seize it; or, if not this one, the next
one."

"I should think--that is--it seems to me," said Clay with careful
consideration, "that your Excellency might be able to render us great
help in this matter yourself.  We need a friend among the Opposition.
In fact--I see where you could assist us in many ways, where your
services would be strictly in the line of your public duty and yet
benefit us very much.  Of course I cannot speak authoritatively without
first consulting Mr. Langham; but I should think he would allow you
personally to purchase as large a block of the stock as you could wish,
either to keep yourself or to resell and distribute among those of your
friends in Opposition where it would do the most good."

Clay looked over inquiringly to where Mendoza sat in the light of the
open door, and the General smiled faintly, and emitted a pleased little
sigh of relief.  "Indeed," continued Clay, "I should think Mr. Langham
might even save you the formality of purchasing the stock outright by
sending you its money equivalent.  I beg your pardon," he asked,
interrupting himself, "does your orderly understand English?"

"He does not," the General assured him, eagerly, dragging his chair a
little closer.

"Suppose now that Mr. Langham were to put fifty or let us say sixty
thousand dollars to your account in the Valencia Bank, do you think
this vote of want of confidence in the Government on the question of
our concession would still be moved?"

"I am sure it would not," exclaimed the leader of the Opposition,
nodding his head violently.

"Sixty thousand dollars," repeated Clay, slowly, "for yourself; and do
you think, General, that were you paid that sum you would be able to
call off your friends, or would they make a demand for stock also?"

"Have no anxiety at all, they do just what I say," returned Mendoza, in
an eager whisper.  "If I say 'It is all right, I am satisfied with what
the Government has done in my absence,' it is enough.  And I will say
it, I give you the word of a soldier, I will say it.  I will not move a
vote of want of confidence on Tuesday.  You need go no farther than
myself.  I am glad that I am powerful enough to serve you, and if you
doubt me"--he struck his heart and bowed with a deprecatory smile--"you
need not pay in the money in exchange for the stock all at the same
time.  You can pay ten thousand this year, and next year ten thousand
more and so on, and so feel confident that I shall have the interests
of the mine always in my heart.  Who knows what may not happen in a
year?  I may be able to serve you even more.  Who knows how long the
present Government will last?  But I give you my word of honor, no
matter whether I be in Opposition or at the head of the Government, if
I receive every six months the retaining fee of which you speak, I will
be your representative.  And my friends can do nothing.  I despise
them.  _I_ am the Opposition.  You have done well, my dear sir, to
consider me alone."

Clay turned in his chair and looked back of him through the office to
the room beyond.

"Boys," he called, "you can come out now."

He rose and pushed his chair away and beckoned to the orderly who sat
in the saddle holding the General's horse.  Langham and MacWilliams
came out and stood in the open door, and Mendoza rose and looked at
Clay.

"You can go now," Clay said to him, quietly.  "And you can rise in the
Senate on Tuesday and move your vote of want of confidence and object
to our concession, and when you have resumed your seat the Secretary of
Mines will rise in his turn and tell the Senate how you stole out here
in the night and tried to blackmail me, and begged me to bribe you to
be silent, and that you offered to throw over your friends and to take
all that we would give you and keep it yourself.  That will make you
popular with your friends, and will show the Government just what sort
of a leader it has working against it."

Clay took a step forward and shook his finger in the officer's face.
"Try to break that concession; try it.  It was made by one Government
to a body of honest, decent business men, with a Government of their
own back of them, and if you interfere with our conceded rights to work
those mines, I'll have a man-of-war down here with white paint on her
hull, and she'll blow you and your little republic back up there into
the mountains.  Now you can go."

Mendoza had straightened with surprise when Clay first began to speak,
and had then bent forward slightly as though he meant to interrupt him.
His eyebrows were lowered in a straight line, and his lips moved
quickly.

"You poor--" he began, contemptuously.  "Bah," he exclaimed, "you're a
fool; I should have sent a servant to talk with you. You are a
child--but you are an insolent child," he cried, suddenly, his anger
breaking out, "and I shall punish you.  You dare to call me names!  You
shall fight me, you shall fight me to-morrow.  You have insulted an
officer, and you shall meet me at once, to-morrow."

"If I meet you to-morrow," Clay replied, "I will thrash you for your
impertinence.  The only reason I don't do it now is because you are on
my doorstep.  You had better not meet me tomorrow, or at any other
time.  And I have no leisure to fight duels with anybody."

"You are a coward," returned the other, quietly, "and I tell you so
before my servant."

Clay gave a short laugh and turned to MacWilliams in the doorway.

"Hand me my gun, MacWilliams," he said, "it's on the shelf to the
right."

MacWilliams stood still and shook his head.  "Oh, let him alone," he
said.  "You've got him where you want him."

"Give me the gun, I tell you," repeated Clay.  "I'm not going to hurt
him, I'm only going to show him how I can shoot."

MacWilliams moved grudgingly across the porch and brought back the
revolver and handed it to Clay. "Look out now," he said, "it's loaded."

At Clay's words the General had retreated hastily to his horse's head
and had begun unbuckling the strap of his holster, and the orderly
reached back into the boot for his carbine.  Clay told him in Spanish
to throw up his hands, and the man, with a frightened look at his
officer, did as the revolver suggested. Then Clay motioned with his
empty hand for the other to desist. "Don't do that," he said, "I'm not
going to hurt you; I'm only going to frighten you a little."

He turned and looked at the student lamp inside, where it stood on the
table in full view.  Then he raised his revolver.  He did not
apparently hold it away from him by the butt, as other men do, but let
it lie in the palm of his hand, into which it seemed to fit like the
hand of a friend.  His first shot broke the top of the glass chimney,
the second shattered the green globe around it, the third put out the
light, and the next drove the lamp crashing to the floor.  There was a
wild yell of terror from the back of the house, and the noise of a
guitar falling down a flight of steps.  "I have probably killed a very
good cook," said Clay, "as I should as certainly kill you, if I were to
meet you.  Langham," he continued, "go tell that cook to come back."

The General sprang into his saddle, and the altitude it gave him seemed
to bring back some of the jauntiness he had lost.

"That was very pretty," he said; "you have been a cowboy, so they tell
me.  It is quite evident by your manners.  No matter, if we do not meet
to-morrow it will be because I have more serious work to do.  Two
months from to-day there will be a new Government in Olancho and a new
President, and the mines will have a new director.  I have tried to be
your friend, Mr. Clay. See how you like me for an enemy.  Goodnight,
gentlemen."

"Good-night," said MacWilliams, unmoved.  "Please ask your man to close
the gate after you."

When the sound of the hoofs had died away the men still stood in an
uncomfortable silence, with Clay twirling the revolver around his
middle finger.  "I'm sorry I had to make a gallery play of that sort,"
he said.  "But it was the only way to make that sort of man understand."

Langham sighed and shook his head ruefully.

"Well," he said, "I thought all the trouble was over, but it looks to
me as though it had just begun.  So far as I can see they're going to
give the governor a run for his money yet."

Clay turned to MacWilliams.

"How many of Mendoza's soldiers have we in the mines, Mac?" he asked.

"About fifteen hundred," MacWilliams answered.  "But you ought to hear
the way they talk of him."

"They do, eh?" said Clay, with a smile of satisfaction. "That's good.
'Six hundred slaves who hate their masters.' What do they say about me?"

"Oh, they think you're all right.  They know you got them their pay and
all that.  They'd do a lot for you."

"Would they fight for me?" asked Clay.

MacWilliams looked up and laughed uneasily.  "I don't know," he said.
"Why, old man?  What do you mean to do?"

"Oh, I don't know," Clay answered.  "I was just wondering whether I
should like to be President of Olancho."



III

The Langhams were to arrive on Friday, and during the week before that
day Clay went about with a long slip of paper in his pocket which he
would consult earnestly in corners, and upon which he would note down
the things that they had left undone.  At night he would sit staring at
it and turning it over in much concern, and would beg Langham to tell
him what he could have meant when he wrote "see Weimer," or "clean
brasses," or "S. Q. M." "Why should I see Weimer," he would exclaim,
"and which brasses, and what does S. Q. M. stand for, for heaven's
sake?"

They held a full-dress rehearsal in the bungalow to improve its state
of preparation, and drilled the servants and talked English to them, so
that they would know what was wanted when the young ladies came.  It
was an interesting exercise, and had the three young men been less
serious in their anxiety to welcome the coming guests they would have
found themselves very amusing--as when Langham would lean over the
balcony in the court and shout back into the kitchen, in what was
supposed to be an imitation of his sister's manner, "Bring my coffee
and rolls--and don't take all day about it either," while Clay and
MacWilliams stood anxiously below to head off the servants when they
carried in a can of hot water instead of bringing the horses round to
the door, as they had been told to do.

"Of course it's a bit rough and all that," Clay would say, "but they
have only to tell us what they want changed and we can have it ready
for them in an hour."

"Oh, my sisters are all right," Langham would reassure him; "they'll
think it's fine.  It will be like camping-out to them, or a picnic.
They'll understand."

But to make sure, and to "test his girders," as Clay put it, they gave
a dinner, and after that a breakfast.  The President came to the first,
with his wife, the Countess Manuelata, Madame la Presidenta, and
Captain Stuart, late of the Gordon Highlanders, and now in command of
the household troops at the Government House and of the body-guard of
the President.  He was a friend of Clay's and popular with every one
present, except for the fact that he occupied this position, instead of
serving his own Government in his own army.  Some people said he had
been crossed in love, others, less sentimental, that he had forged a
check, or mixed up the mess accounts of his company.  But Clay and
MacWilliams said it concerned no one why he was there, and then
emphasized the remark by picking a quarrel with a man who had given an
unpleasant reason for it.  Stuart, so far as they were concerned, could
do no wrong.

The dinner went off very well, and the President consented to dine with
them in a week, on the invitation of young Langham to meet his father.

"Miss Langham is very beautiful, they tell me," Madame Alvarez said to
Clay.  "I heard of her one winter in Rome; she was presented there and
much admired."

"Yes, I believe she is considered very beautiful," Clay said. "I have
only just met her, but she has travelled a great deal and knows every
one who is of interest, and I think you will like her very much."

"I mean to like her," said the woman.  "There are very few of the
native ladies who have seen much of the world beyond a trip to Paris,
where they live in their hotels and at the dressmaker's while their
husbands enjoy themselves; and sometimes I am rather heart-sick for my
home and my own people.  I was overjoyed when I heard Miss Langham was
to be with us this winter.  But you must not keep her out here to
yourselves.  It is too far and too selfish.  She must spend some time
with me at the Government House."

"Yes," said Clay, "I am afraid of that.  I am afraid the young ladies
will find it rather lonely out here."

"Ah, no," exclaimed the woman, quickly.  "You have made it beautiful,
and it is only a half-hour's ride, except when it rains," she added,
laughing, "and then it is almost as easy to row as to ride."

"I will have the road repaired," interrupted the President. "It is my
wish, Mr. Clay, that you will command me in every way; I am most
desirous to make the visit of Mr. Langham agreeable to him, he is doing
so much for us."

The breakfast was given later in the week, and only men were present.
They were the rich planters and bankers of Valencia, generals in the
army, and members of the Cabinet, and officers from the tiny war-ship
in the harbor.  The breeze from the bay touched them through the open
doors, the food and wine cheered them, and the eager courtesy and
hospitality of the three Americans pleased and flattered them.  They
were of a people who better appreciate the amenities of life than its
sacrifices.

The breakfast lasted far into the afternoon, and, inspired by the
success of the banquet, Clay quite unexpectedly found himself on his
feet with his hand on his heart, thanking the guests for the good-will
and assistance which they had given him in his work.  "I have tramped
down your coffee plants, and cut away your forests, and disturbed your
sleep with my engines, and you have not complained," he said, in his
best Spanish, "and we will show that we are not ungrateful."

Then Weimer, the Consul, spoke, and told them that in his Annual
Consular Report, which he had just forwarded to the State Department,
he had related how ready the Government of Olancho had been to assist
the American company.  "And I hope," he concluded, "that you will allow
me, gentlemen, to propose the health of President Alvarez and the
members of his Cabinet."

The men rose to their feet, one by one, filling their glasses and
laughing and saying, "Viva el Gobernador," until they were all
standing.  Then, as they looked at one another and saw only the faces
of friends, some one of them cried, suddenly, "To President Alvarez,
Dictator of Olancho!"

The cry was drowned in a yell of exultation, and men sprang cheering to
their chairs waving their napkins above their heads, and those who wore
swords drew them and flashed them in the air, and the quiet, lazy
good-nature of the breakfast was turned into an uproarious scene of
wild excitement.  Clay pushed back his chair from the head of the table
with an anxious look at the servants gathered about the open door, and
Weimer clutched frantically at Langham's elbow and whispered, "What did
I say? For heaven's sake, how did it begin?"

The outburst ceased as suddenly as it had started, and old General
Rojas, the Vice-President, called out, "What is said is said, but it
must not be repeated."

Stuart waited until after the rest had gone, and Clay led him out to
the end of the veranda.  "Now will you kindly tell me what that was?"
Clay asked.  "It didn't sound like champagne."

"No," said the other, "I thought you knew.  Alvarez means to proclaim
himself Dictator, if he can, before the spring elections."

"And are you going to help him?"

"Of course," said the Englishman, simply.

"Well, that's all right," said Clay, "but there's no use shouting the
fact all over the shop like that--and they shouldn't drag me into it."

Stuart laughed easily and shook his head.  "It won't be long before
you'll be in it yourself," he said.

Clay awoke early Friday morning to hear the shutters beating viciously
against the side of the house, and the wind rushing through the palms,
and the rain beating in splashes on the zinc roof.  It did not come
soothingly and in a steady downpour, but brokenly, like the rush of
waves sweeping over a rough beach.  He turned on the pillow and shut
his eyes again with the same impotent and rebellious sense of
disappointment that he used to feel when he had wakened as a boy and
found it storming on his holiday, and he tried to sleep once more in
the hope that when he again awoke the sun would be shining in his eyes;
but the storm only slackened and did not cease, and the rain continued
to fall with dreary, relentless persistence.  The men climbed the muddy
road to the Palms, and viewed in silence the wreck which the night had
brought to their plants and garden paths.  Rivulets of muddy water had
cut gutters over the lawn and poured out from under the veranda, and
plants and palms lay bent and broken, with their broad leaves
bedraggled and coated with mud.  The harbor and the encircling
mountains showed dimly through a curtain of warm, sticky rain.  To
something that Langham said of making the best of it, MacWilliams
replied, gloomily, that he would not be at all surprised if the ladies
refused to leave the ship and demanded to be taken home immediately.
"I am sorry," Clay said, simply; "I wanted them to like it."

The men walked back to the office in grim silence, and took turns in
watching with a glass the arms of the semaphore, three miles below, at
the narrow opening of the bay.  Clay smiled nervously at himself, with
a sudden sinking at the heart, and with a hot blush of pleasure, as he
thought of how often he had looked at its great arms out lined like a
mast against the sky, and thanked it in advance for telling him that
she was near.  In the harbor below, the vessels lay with bare yards and
empty decks, the wharves were deserted, and only an occasional small
boat moved across the beaten surface of the bay.

But at twelve o'clock MacWilliams lowered the glass quickly, with a
little gasp of excitement, rubbed its moist lens on the inside of his
coat and turned it again toward a limp strip of bunting that was
crawling slowly up the halyards of the semaphore.  A second dripping
rag answered it from the semaphore in front of the Custom-House, and
MacWilliams laughed nervously and shut the glass.

"It's red," he said; "they've come."

They had planned to wear white duck suits, and go out in a launch with
a flag flying, and they had made MacWilliams purchase a red cummerbund
and a pith helmet; but they tumbled into the launch now, wet and
bedraggled as they were, and raced Weimer in his boat, with the
American flag clinging to the pole, to the side of the big steamer as
she drew slowly into the bay.  Other row-boats and launches and
lighters began to push out from the wharves, men appeared under the
sagging awnings of the bare houses along the river-front, and the
custom and health officers in shining oil-skins and puffing damp cigars
clambered over the side.

"I see them," cried Langham, jumping up and rocking the boat in his
excitement.  "There they are in the bow.  That's Hope waving.  Hope!
hullo, Hope!" he shouted, "hullo!" Clay recognized her standing between
the younger sister and her father, with the rain beating on all of
them, and waving her hand to Langham.  The men took off their hats, and
as they pulled up alongside she bowed to Clay and nodded brightly.
They sent Langham up the gangway first, and waited until he had made
his greetings to his family alone.

"We have had a terrible trip, Mr. Clay," Miss Langham said to him,
beginning, as people will, with the last few days, as though they were
of the greatest importance; "and we could see nothing of you at the
mines at all as we passed--only a wet flag, and a lot of very friendly
workmen, who cheered and fired off pans of dynamite."

"They did, did they?" said Clay, with a satisfied nod. "That's all
right, then.  That was a royal salute in your honor. Kirkland had that
to do.  He's the foreman of A opening.  I am awfully sorry about this
rain--it spoils everything."

"I hope it hasn't spoiled our breakfast," said Mr. Langham. "We haven't
eaten anything this morning, because we wanted a change of diet, and
the captain told us we should be on shore before now."

"We have some carriages for you at the wharf, and we will drive you
right out to the Palms," said young Langham.  "It's shorter by water,
but there's a hill that the girls couldn't climb today. That's the
house we built for you, Governor, with the flag-pole, up there on the
hill; and there's your ugly old pier; and that's where we live, in the
little shack above it, with the tin roof; and that opening to the right
is the terminus of the railroad MacWilliams built.  Where's
MacWilliams?  Here, Mac, I want you to know my father.  This is
MacWilliams, sir, of whom I wrote you."

There was some delay about the baggage, and in getting the party
together in the boats that Langham and the Consul had brought; and
after they had stood for some time on the wet dock, hungry and damp, it
was rather aggravating to find that the carriages which Langham had
ordered to be at one pier had gone to another.  So the new arrivals sat
rather silently under the shed of the levee on a row of cotton-bales,
while Clay and MacWilliams raced off after the carriages.

"I wish we didn't have to keep the hood down," young Langham said,
anxiously, as they at last proceeded heavily up the muddy streets; "it
makes it so hot, and you can't see anything.  Not that it's worth
seeing in all this mud and muck, but it's great when the sun shines.
We had planned it all so differently."

He was alone with his family now in one carriage, and the other men and
the servants were before them in two others.  It seemed an interminable
ride to them all--to the strangers, and to the men who were anxious
that they should be pleased.  They left the city at last, and toiled
along the limestone road to the Palms, rocking from side to side and
sinking in ruts filled with rushing water.  When they opened the flap
of the hood the rain beat in on them, and when they closed it they
stewed in a damp, warm atmosphere of wet leather and horse-hair.

"This is worse than a Turkish bath," said Hope, faintly. "Don't you
live anywhere, Ted?"

"Oh, it's not far now," said the younger brother, dismally; but even as
he spoke the carriage lurched forward and plunged to one side and came
to a halt, and they could hear the streams rushing past the wheels like
the water at the bow of a boat.  A wet, black face appeared at the
opening of the hood, and a man spoke despondently in Spanish.

"He says we're stuck in the mud," explained Langham.  He looked at them
so beseechingly and so pitifully, with the perspiration streaming down
his face, and his clothes damp and bedraggled, that Hope leaned back
and laughed, and his father patted him on the knee.  "It can't be any
worse," he said, cheerfully; "it must mend now.  It is not your fault,
Ted, that we're starving and lost in the mud."

Langham looked out to find Clay and MacWilliams knee-deep in the
running water, with their shoulders against the muddy wheels, and the
driver lashing at the horses and dragging at their bridles. He sprang
out to their assistance, and Hope, shaking off her sister's detaining
hands, jumped out after him, laughing.  She splashed up the hill to the
horses' heads, motioning to the driver to release his hold on their
bridles.

"That is not the way to treat a horse," she said.  "Let me have them.
Are you men all ready down there?" she called. Each of the three men
glued a shoulder to a wheel, and clenched his teeth and nodded.  "All
right, then," Hope called back. She took hold of the huge Mexican bits
close to the mouth, where the pressure was not so cruel, and then
coaxing and tugging by turns, and slipping as often as the horses
themselves, she drew them out of the mud, and with the help of the men
back of the carriage pulled it clear until it stood free again at the
top of the hill.  Then she released her hold on the bridles and looked
down, in dismay, at her frock and hands, and then up at the three men.
They appeared so utterly miserable and forlorn in their muddy garments,
and with their faces washed with the rain and perspiration, that the
girl gave way suddenly to an uncontrollable shriek of delight.  The men
stared blankly at her for a moment, and then inquiringly at one
another, and as the humor of the situation struck them they burst into
an echoing shout of laughter, which rose above the noise of the wind
and rain, and before which the disappointments and trials of the
morning were swept away.  Before they reached the Palms the sun was out
and shining with fierce brilliancy, reflecting its rays on every damp
leaf, and drinking up each glistening pool of water.

MacWilliams and Clay left the Langhams alone together, and returned to
the office, where they assured each other again and again that there
was no doubt, from what each had heard different members of the family
say, that they were greatly pleased with all that had been prepared for
them.

"They think it's fine!" said young Langham, who had run down the hill
to tell them about it.  "I tell you, they are pleased. I took them all
over the house, and they just exclaimed every minute.  Of course," he
said, dispassionately, "I thought they'd like it, but I had no idea it
would please them as much as it has.  My Governor is so delighted with
the place that he's sitting out there on the veranda now, rocking
himself up and down and taking long breaths of sea-air, just as though
he owned the whole coast-line."

Langham dined with his people that night, Clay and MacWilliams having
promised to follow him up the hill later.  It was a night of much
moment to them all, and the two men ate their dinner in silence, each
considering what the coming of the strangers might mean to him.

As he was leaving the room MacWilliams stopped and hovered uncertainly
in the doorway.

"Are you going to get yourself into a dress-suit to-night?" he asked.
Clay said that he thought he would; he wanted to feel quite clean once
more.

"Well, all right, then," the other returned, reluctantly. "I'll do it
for this once, if you mean to, but you needn't think I'm going to make
a practice of it, for I'm not.  I haven't worn a dress-suit," he
continued, as though explaining his principles in the matter, "since
your spread when we opened the railroad--that's six months ago; and the
time before that I wore one at MacGolderick's funeral.  MacGolderick
blew himself up at Puerto Truxillo, shooting rocks for the breakwater.
We never found all of him, but we gave what we could get together as
fine a funeral as those natives ever saw.  The boys, they wanted to
make him look respectable, so they asked me to lend them my dress-suit,
but I told them I meant to wear it myself.  That's how I came to wear a
dress-suit at a funeral.  It was either me or MacGolderick."

"MacWilliams," said Clay, as he stuck the toe of one boot into the heel
of the other, "if I had your imagination I'd give up railroading and
take to writing war clouds for the newspapers."

"Do you mean you don't believe that story?" MacWilliams demanded,
sternly.

"I do," said Clay, "I mean I don't."

"Well, let it go," returned MacWilliams, gloomily; "but there's been
funerals for less than that, let me tell you."

A half-hour later MacWilliams appeared in the door and stood gazing
attentively at Clay arranging his tie before a hand-glass, and then at
himself in his unusual apparel.

"No wonder you voted to dress up," he exclaimed finally, in a tone of
personal injury.  "That's not a dress-suit you've got on anyway.  It
hasn't any tails.  And I hope for your sake, Mr. Clay," he continued,
his voice rising in plaintive indignation, "that you are not going to
play that scarf on us for a vest. And you haven't got a high collar on,
either.  That's only a rough blue print of a dress-suit.  Why, you look
just as comfortable as though you were going to enjoy yourself--and you
look cool, too."

"Well, why not?" laughed Clay.

"Well, but look at me," cried the other.  "Do I look cool?  Do I look
happy or comfortable?  No, I don't.  I look just about the way I feel,
like a fool undertaker.  I'm going to take this thing right off.  You
and Ted Langham can wear your silk scarfs and bobtail coats, if you
like, but if they don't want me in white duck they don't get me."

When they reached the Palms, Clay asked Miss Langham if she did not
want to see his view.  "And perhaps, if you appreciate it properly, I
will make you a present of it," he said, as he walked before her down
the length of the veranda.

"It would be very selfish to keep it all to my self," she said.

"Couldn't we share it?"  They had left the others seated facing the
bay, with MacWilliams and young Langham on the broad steps of the
veranda, and the younger sister and her father sitting in long bamboo
steamer-chairs above them.

Clay and Miss Langham were quite alone.  From the high cliff on which
the Palms stood they could look down the narrow inlet that joined the
ocean and see the moonlight turning the water into a rippling ladder of
light and gilding the dark green leaves of the palms near them with a
border of silver.  Directly below them lay the waters of the bay,
reflecting the red and green lights of the ships at anchor, and beyond
them again were the yellow lights of the town, rising one above the
other as the city crept up the hill.  And back of all were the
mountains, grim and mysterious, with white clouds sleeping in their
huge valleys, like masses of fog.

Except for the ceaseless murmur of the insect life about them the night
was absolutely still--so still that the striking of the ships' bells in
the harbor came to them sharply across the surface of the water, and
they could hear from time to time the splash of some great fish and the
steady creaking of an oar in a rowlock that grew fainter and fainter as
it grew further away, until it was drowned in the distance.  Miss
Langham was for a long time silent.  She stood with her hands clasped
behind her, gazing from side to side into the moonlight, and had
apparently forgotten that Clay was present.

"Well," he said at last, "I think you appreciate it properly. I was
afraid you would exclaim about it, and say it was fine, or charming, or
something."

Miss Langham turned to him and smiled slightly.  "And you told me once
that you knew me so very well," she said.

Clay chose to forget much that he had said on that night when he had
first met her.  He knew that he had been bold then, and had dared to be
so because he did not think he would see her again; but, now that he
was to meet her every day through several months, it seemed better to
him that they should grow to know each other as they really were,
simply and sincerely, and without forcing the situation in any way.

So he replied, "I don't know you so well now.  You must remember I
haven't seen you for a year."

"Yes, but you hadn't seen me for twenty-two years then," she answered.
"I don't think you have changed much," she went on. "I expected to find
you gray with cares.  Ted wrote us about the way you work all day at
the mines and sit up all night over calculations and plans and reports.
But you don't show it.  When are you going to take us over the mines?
To-morrow?  I am very anxious to see them, but I suppose father will
want to inspect them first.  Hope knows all about them, I believe; she
knows their names, and how much you have taken out, and how much you
have put in, too, and what MacWilliams's railroad cost, and who got the
contract for the ore pier.  Ted told us in his letters, and she used to
work it out on the map in father's study.  She is a most energetic
child; I think sometimes she should have been a boy.  I wish I could be
the help to any one that she is to my father and to me.  Whenever I am
blue or down she makes fun of me, and--"

"Why should you ever be blue?" asked Clay, abruptly.

"There is no real reason, I suppose," the girl answered, smiling,
"except that life is so very easy for me that I have to invent some
woes.  I should be better for a few reverses."  And then she went on in
a lower voice, and turning her head away, "In our family there is no
woman older than I am to whom I can go with questions that trouble me.
Hope is like a boy, as I said, and plays with Ted, and my father is
very busy with his affairs, and since my mother died I have been very
much alone.  A man cannot understand.  And I cannot understand why I
should be speaking to you about myself and my troubles, except--" she
added, a little wistfully, "that you once said you were interested in
me, even if it was as long as a year ago. And because I want you to be
very kind to me, as you have been to Ted, and I hope that we are going
to be very good friends."

She was so beautiful, standing in the shadow with the moonlight about
her and with her hand held out to him, that Clay felt as though the
scene were hardly real.  He took her hand in his and held it for a
moment.  His pleasure in the sweet friendliness of her manner and in
her beauty was so great that it kept him silent.

"Friends!" he laughed under his breath.  "I don't think there is much
danger of our not being friends.  The danger lies," he went on,
smiling, "in my not being able to stop there."

Miss Langham made no sign that she had heard him, but turned and walked
out into the moonlight and down the porch to where the others were
sitting.

Young Langham had ordered a native orchestra of guitars and reed
instruments from the town to serenade his people, and they were
standing in front of the house in the moonlight as Miss Langham and
Clay came forward.  They played the shrill, eerie music of their
country with a passion and feeling that filled out the strange tropical
scene around them; but Clay heard them only as an accompaniment to his
own thoughts, and as a part of the beautiful night and the tall,
beautiful girl who had dominated it.  He watched her from the shadow as
she sat leaning easily forward and looking into the night.  The
moonlight fell full upon her, and though she did not once look at him
or turn her head in his direction, he felt as though she must be
conscious of his presence, as though there were already an
understanding between them which she herself had established.  She had
asked him to be her friend.  That was only a pretty speech, perhaps;
but she had spoken of herself, and had hinted at her perplexities and
her loneliness, and he argued that while it was no compliment to be
asked to share another's pleasure, it must mean something when one was
allowed to learn a little of another's troubles.

And while his mind was flattered and aroused by this promise of
confidence between them, he was rejoicing in the rare quality of her
beauty, and in the thought that she was to be near him, and near him
here, of all places.  It seemed a very wonderful thing to
Clay--something that could only have happened in a novel or a play.
For while the man and the hour frequently appeared together, he had
found that the one woman in the world and the place and the man was a
much more difficult combination to bring into effect.  No one, he
assured himself thankfully, could have designed a more lovely setting
for his love-story, if it was to be a love-story, and he hoped it was,
than this into which she had come of her own free will.  It was a land
of romance and adventure, of guitars and latticed windows, of warm
brilliant days and gorgeous silent nights, under purple heavens and
white stars.  And he was to have her all to himself, with no one near
to interrupt, no other friends, even, and no possible rival.  She was
not guarded now by a complex social system, with its responsibilities.
He was the most lucky of men.  Others had only seen her in her
drawing-room or in an opera-box, but he was free to ford
mountain-streams at her side, or ride with her under arches of the
great palms, or to play a guitar boldly beneath her window.  He was
free to come and go at any hour; not only free to do so, but the very
nature of his duties made it necessary that they should be thrown
constantly together.

The music of the violins moved him and touched him deeply, and stirred
depths at which he had not guessed.  It made him humble and deeply
grateful, and he felt how mean and unworthy he was of such great
happiness.  He had never loved any woman as he felt that he could love
this woman, as he hoped that he was to love her.  For he was not so far
blinded by her beauty and by what he guessed her character to be, as to
imagine that he really knew her.  He only knew what he hoped she was,
what he believed the soul must be that looked out of those kind,
beautiful eyes, and that found utterance in that wonderful voice which
could control him and move him by a word.

He felt, as he looked at the group before him, how lonely his own life
had been, how hard he had worked for so little--for what other men
found ready at hand when they were born into the world.

He felt almost a touch of self-pity at his own imperfectness; and the
power of his will and his confidence in himself, of which he was so
proud, seemed misplaced and little.  And then he wondered if he had not
neglected chances; but in answer to this his injured self-love rose to
rebut the idea that he had wasted any portion of his time, and he
assured himself that he had done the work that he had cut out for
himself to do as best he could; no one but himself knew with what
courage and spirit.  And so he sat combating with himself, hoping one
moment that she would prove what he believed her to be, and the next,
scandalized at his temerity in daring to think of her at all.

The spell lifted as the music ceased, and Clay brought himself back to
the moment and looked about him as though he were waking from a dream
and had expected to see the scene disappear and the figures near him
fade into the moonlight.

Young Langham had taken a guitar from one of the musicians and pressed
it upon MacWilliams, with imperative directions to sing such and such
songs, of which, in their isolation, they had grown to think most
highly, and MacWilliams was protesting in much embarrassment.

MacWilliams had a tenor voice which he maltreated in the most villanous
manner by singing directly through his nose.  He had a taste for
sentimental songs, in which "kiss" rhymed with "bliss," and in which
"the people cry" was always sure to be followed with "as she goes by,
that's pretty Katie Moody," or "Rosie McIntyre."  He had gathered his
songs at the side of camp-fires, and in canteens at the first
section-house of a new railroad, and his original collection of ballads
had had but few additions in several years.  MacWilliams at first was
shy, which was quite a new development, until he made them promise to
laugh if they wanted to laugh, explaining that he would not mind that
so much as he would the idea that he thought he was serious.

The song of which he was especially fond was one called "He never cares
to wander from his own Fireside," which was especially appropriate in
coming from a man who had visited almost every spot in the three
Americas, except his home, in ten years.  MacWilliams always ended the
evening's entertainment with this chorus, no matter how many times it
had been sung previously, and seemed to regard it with much the same
veneration that the true Briton feels for his national anthem.

The words of the chorus were:

    "He never cares to wander from his own fireside,
      He never cares to wander or to roam.
      With his babies on his knee,
      He's as happy as can be,
      For there's no place like Home, Sweet Home."

MacWilliams loved accidentals, and what he called "barber-shop chords."
He used a beautiful accidental at the word "be," of which he was very
fond, and he used to hang on that note for a long time, so that those
in the extreme rear of the hall, as he was wont to explain, should get
the full benefit of it.  And it was his custom to emphasize "for" in
the last line by speaking instead of singing it, and then coming to a
full stop before dashing on again with the excellent truth that "there
is NO place like Home, Sweet Home."

The men at the mines used to laugh at him and his song at first, but
they saw that it was not to be so laughed away, and that he regarded it
with some peculiar sentiment.  So they suffered him to sing it in peace.

MacWilliams went through his repertoire to the unconcealed amusement of
young Langham and Hope.  When he had finished he asked Hope if she knew
a comic song of which he had only heard by reputation.  One of the men
at the mines had gained a certain celebrity by claiming to have heard
it in the States, but as he gave a completely new set of words to the
tune of the "Wearing of the Green" as the true version, his veracity
was doubted. Hope said she knew it, of course, and they all went into
the drawing-room, where the men grouped themselves about the piano. It
was a night they remembered long afterward.  Hope sat at the piano
protesting and laughing, but singing the songs of which the new-comers
had become so weary, but which the three men heard open-eyed, and
hailed with shouts of pleasure.  The others enjoyed them and their
delight, as though they were people in a play expressing themselves in
this extravagant manner for their entertainment, until they understood
how poverty-stricken their lives had been and that they were not only
enjoying the music for itself, but because it was characteristic of all
that they had left behind them.  It was pathetic to hear them boast of
having read of a certain song in such a paper, and of the fact that
they knew the plot of a late comic opera and the names of those who had
played in it, and that it had or had not been acceptable to the New
York public.

"Dear me," Hope would cry, looking over her shoulder with a despairing
glance at her sister and father, "they don't even know 'Tommy Atkins'!"

It was a very happy evening for them all, foreshadowing, as it did, a
continuation of just such evenings.  Young Langham was radiant with
pleasure at the good account which Clay had given of him to his father,
and Mr. Langham was gratified, and proud of the manner in which his son
and heir had conducted himself; and MacWilliams, who had never before
been taken so simply and sincerely by people of a class that he had
always held in humorous awe, felt a sudden accession of dignity, and an
unhappy fear that when they laughed at what he said, it was because its
sense was so utterly different from their point of view, and not
because they saw the humor of it.  He did not know what the word "snob"
signified, and in his roughened, easy-going nature there was no touch
of false pride; but he could not help thinking how surprised his people
would be if they could see him, whom they regarded as a wanderer and
renegade on the face of the earth and the prodigal of the family, and
for that reason the best loved, leaning over a grand piano, while one
daughter of his much-revered president played comic songs for his
delectation, and the other, who according to the newspapers refused
princes daily, and who was the most wonderful creature he had ever
seen, poured out his coffee and brought it to him with her own hands.

The evening came to an end at last, and the new arrivals accompanied
their visitors to the veranda as they started to their cabin for the
night.  Clay was asking Mr. Langham when he wished to visit the mines,
and the others were laughing over farewell speeches, when young Langham
startled them all by hurrying down the length of the veranda and
calling on them to follow.

"Look!" he cried, pointing down the inlet.  "Here comes a man-of-war,
or a yacht.  Isn't she smart-looking?  What can she want here at this
hour of the night?  They won't let them land.  Can you make her out,
MacWilliams?"

A long, white ship was steaming slowly up the inlet, and passed within
a few hundred feet of the cliff on which they were standing.

"Why, it's the 'Vesta'!" exclaimed Hope, wonderingly.  "I thought she
wasn't coming for a week?"

"It can't be the 'Vesta'!" said the elder sister; "she was not to have
sailed from Havana until to-day."

"What do you mean?" asked Langham.  "Is it King's boat?  Do you expect
him here?  Oh, what fun!  I say, Clay, here's the 'Vesta,' Reggie
King's yacht, and he's no end of a sport.  We can go all over the place
now, and he can land us right at the door of the mines if we want to."

"Is it the King I met at dinner that night?" asked Clay, turning to
Miss Langham.

"Yes," she said.  "He wanted us to come down on the yacht, but we
thought the steamer would be faster; so he sailed without us and was to
have touched at Havana, but he has apparently changed his course.
Doesn't she look like a phantom ship in the moonlight?"

Young Langham thought he could distinguish King among the white figures
on the bridge, and tossed his hat and shouted, and a man in the stern
of the yacht replied with a wave of his hand.

"That must be Mr. King," said Hope.  "He didn't bring any one with him,
and he seems to be the only man aft."

They stood watching the yacht as she stopped with a rattle of
anchor-chains and a confusion of orders that came sharply across the
water, and then the party separated and the three men walked down the
hill, Langham eagerly assuring the other two that King was a very good
sort, and telling them what a treasure-house his yacht was, and how he
would have probably brought the latest papers, and that he would
certainly give a dance on board in their honor.

The men stood for some short time together, after they had reached the
office, discussing the great events of the day, and then with cheerful
good-nights disappeared into their separate rooms.

An hour later Clay stood without his coat, and with a pen in his hand,
at MacWilliams's bedside and shook him by the shoulder.

"I'm not asleep," said MacWilliams, sitting up; "what is it? What have
you been doing?" he demanded.  "Not working?"

"There were some reports came in after we left," said Clay, "and I find
I will have to see Kirkland to-morrow morning.  Send them word to run
me down on an engine at five-thirty, will you? I am sorry to have to
wake you, but I couldn't remember in which shack that engineer lives."

MacWilliams jumped from his bed and began kicking about the floor for
his boots.  "Oh, that's all right," he said.  "I wasn't asleep, I was
just--" he lowered his voice that Langham might not hear him through
the canvas partitions--"I was just lying awake playing duets with the
President, and racing for the International Cup in my new centre-board
yacht, that's all!"

MacWilliams buttoned a waterproof coat over his pajamas and stamped his
bare feet into his boots.  "Oh, I tell you, Clay," he said with a grim
chuckle, "we're mixing right in with the four hundred, we are!  I'm
substitute and understudy when anybody gets ill.  We're right in our
own class at last!  Pure amateurs with no professional record against
us.  Me and President Langham, I guess!" He struck a match and lit the
smoky wick in a tin lantern.

"But now," he said, cheerfully, "my time being too valuable for me to
sleep, I will go wake up that nigger engine-driver and set his alarm
clock at five-thirty.  Five-thirty, I believe you said.  All right;
good-night."  And whistling cheerfully to himself MacWilliams
disappeared up the hill, his body hidden in the darkness and his legs
showing fantastically in the light of the swinging lantern.

Clay walked out upon the veranda and stood with his back to one of the
pillars.  MacWilliams and his pleasantries disturbed and troubled him.
Perhaps, after all, the boy was right.  It seemed absurd, but it was
true.  They were only employees of Langham--two of the thousands of
young men who were working all over the United States to please him, to
make him richer, to whom he was only a name and a power, which meant an
increase of salary or the loss of place.

Clay laughed and shrugged his shoulders.  He knew that he was not in
that class; if he did good work it was because his self-respect
demanded it of him; he did not work for Langham or the Olancho Mining
Company (Limited).  And yet he turned with almost a feeling of
resentment toward the white yacht lying calmly in magnificent repose a
hundred yards from his porch.

He could see her as clearly in her circle of electric lights as though
she were a picture and held in the light of a stereopticon on a screen.
He could see her white decks, and the rails of polished brass, and the
comfortable wicker chairs and gay cushions and flat coils of rope, and
the tapering masts and intricate rigging.  How easy it was made for
some men!  This one had come like the prince in the fairy tale on his
magic carpet.  If Alice Langham were to leave Valencia that next day,
Clay could not follow her.  He had his duties and responsibilities; he
was at another man's bidding.

But this Prince Fortunatus had but to raise anchor and start in
pursuit, knowing that he would be welcome wherever he found her. That
was the worst of it to Clay, for he knew that men did not follow women
from continent to continent without some assurance of a friendly
greeting.  Clay's mind went back to the days when he was a boy, when
his father was absent fighting for a lost cause; when his mother taught
in a little schoolhouse under the shadow of Pike's Peak, and when Kit
Carson was his hero.  He thought of the poverty of those days poverty
so mean and hopeless that it was almost something to feel shame for; of
the days that followed when, an orphan and without a home, he had
sailed away from New Orleans to the Cape.  How the mind of the
mathematician, which he had inherited from the Boston schoolmistress,
had been swayed by the spirit of the soldier, which he had inherited
from his father, and which led him from the mines of South Africa to
little wars in Madagascar, Egypt, and Algiers.  It had been a life as
restless as the seaweed on a rock.  But as he looked back to its poor
beginnings and admitted to himself its later successes, he gave a sigh
of content, and shaking off the mood stood up and paced the length of
the veranda.

He looked up the hill to the low-roofed bungalow with the palm-leaves
about it, outlined against the sky, and as motionless as patterns cut
in tin.  He had built that house.  He had built it for her.  That was
her room where the light was shining out from the black bulk of the
house about it like a star.  And beyond the house he saw his five great
mountains, the knuckles of the giant hand, with its gauntlet of iron
that lay shut and clenched in the face of the sea that swept up
whimpering before it.  Clay felt a boyish, foolish pride rise in his
breast as he looked toward the great mines he had discovered and
opened, at the iron mountains that were crumbling away before his touch.

He turned his eyes again to the blazing yacht, and this time there was
no trace of envy in them.  He laughed instead, partly with pleasure at
the thought of the struggle he scented in the air, and partly at his
own braggadocio.

"I'm not afraid," he said, smiling, and shaking his head at the white
ship that loomed up like a man-of-war in the black waters. "I'm not
afraid to fight you for anything worth fighting for."

He bowed his bared head in good-night toward the light on the hill, as
he turned and walked back into his bedroom.  "And I think," he murmured
grimly, as he put out the light, "that she is worth fighting for."



IV

The work which had called Clay to the mines kept him there for some
time, and it was not until the third day after the arrival of the
Langhams that he returned again to the Palms.  On the afternoon when he
climbed the hill to the bungalow he found the Langhams as he had left
them, with the difference that King now occupied a place in the family
circle.  Clay was made so welcome, and especially so by King, that he
felt rather ashamed of his sentiments toward him, and considered his
three days of absence to be well repaid by the heartiness of their
greeting.

"For myself," said Mr. Langham, "I don't believe you had anything to do
at the mines at all.  I think you went away just to show us how
necessary you are.  But if you want me to make a good report of our
resident director on my return, you had better devote yourself less to
the mines while you are here and more to us."  Clay said he was glad to
find that his duties were to be of so pleasant a nature, and asked them
what they had seen and what they had done.

They told him they had been nowhere, but had waited for his return in
order that he might act as their guide.

"Then you should see the city at once," said Clay, "and I will have the
volante brought to the door, and we can all go in this afternoon.
There is room for the four of you inside, and I can sit on the box-seat
with the driver."

"No," said King, "let Hope or me sit on the box-seat.  Then we can
practise our Spanish on the driver."

"Not very well," Clay replied, "for the driver sits on the first horse,
like a postilion.  It's a sort of tandem without reins.  Haven't you
seen it yet?  We consider the volante our proudest exhibit."  So Clay
ordered the volante to be brought out, and placed them facing each
other in the open carriage, while he climbed to the box-seat, from
which position of vantage he pointed out and explained the objects of
interest they passed, after the manner of a professional guide.  It was
a warm, beautiful afternoon, and the clear mists of the atmosphere
intensified the rich blue of the sky, and the brilliant colors of the
houses, and the different shades of green of the trees and bushes that
lined the highroad to the capital.

"To the right, as we descend," said Clay, speaking over his shoulder,
"you see a tin house.  It is the home of the resident director of the
Olancho Mining Company (Limited), and of his able lieutenants, Mr.
Theodore Langham and Mr. MacWilliams. The building on the extreme left
is the round-house, in which Mr. MacWilliams stores his three
locomotive engines, and in the far middle-distance is Mr. MacWilliams
himself in the act of repairing a water-tank.  He is the one in a suit
of blue overalls, and as his language at such times is free, we will
drive rapidly on and not embarrass him.  Besides," added the engineer,
with the happy laugh of a boy who had been treated to a holiday, "I am
sure that I am not setting him the example of fixity to duty which he
should expect from his chief."

They passed between high hedges of Spanish bayonet, and came to mud
cabins thatched with palm-leaves, and alive with naked, little
brown-bodied children, who laughed and cheered to them as they passed.

"It's a very beautiful country for the pueblo," was Clay's comment.
"Different parts of the same tree furnish them with food, shelter, and
clothing, and the sun gives them fuel, and the Government changes so
often that they can always dodge the tax-collector."

From the mud cabins they came to more substantial one-story houses of
adobe, with the walls painted in two distinct colors, blue, pink, or
yellow, with red-tiled roofs, and the names with which they had been
christened in bold black letters above the entrances.  Then the
carriage rattled over paved streets, and they drove between houses of
two stories painted more decorously in pink and light blue, with
wide-open windows, guarded by heavy bars of finely wrought iron and
ornamented with scrollwork in stucco.  The principal streets were given
up to stores and caf;s, all wide open to the pavement and protected
from the sun by brilliantly striped awnings, and gay with the national
colors of Olancho in flags and streamers.  In front of them sat
officers in uniform, and the dark-skinned dandies of Valencia, in white
duck suits and Panama hats, toying with tortoise shell canes, which
could be converted, if the occasion demanded, into blades of Toledo
steel.  In the streets were priests and bare-legged mule drivers, and
ragged ranchmen with red-caped cloaks hanging to their sandals, and
negro women, with bare shoulders and long trains, vending lottery
tickets and rolling huge cigars between their lips.  It was an old
story to Clay and King, but none of the others had seen a
Spanish-American city before; they were familiar with the Far East and
the Mediterranean, but not with the fierce, hot tropics of their sister
continent, and so their eyes were wide open, and they kept calling
continually to one another to notice some new place or figure.

They in their turn did not escape from notice or comment.  The two
sisters would have been conspicuous anywhere--in a queen's drawing-room
or on an Indian reservation.  Theirs was a type that the caballeros and
senoritas did not know.  With them dark hair was always associated with
dark complexions, the rich duskiness of which was always vulgarized by
a coat of powder, and this fair blending of pink and white skin under
masses of black hair was strangely new, so that each of the few women
who were to be met on the street turned to look after the carriage,
while the American women admired their mantillas, and felt that the
straw sailor-hats they wore had become heavy and unfeminine.

Clay was very happy in picking out what was most characteristic and
picturesque, and every street into which he directed the driver to take
them seemed to possess some building or monument that was of peculiar
interest.  They did not know that he had mapped out this ride many
times before, and was taking them over a route which he had already
travelled with them in imagination. King knew what the capital would be
like before he entered it, from his experience of other South American
cities, but he acted as though it were all new to him, and allowed Clay
to explain, and to give the reason for those features of the place that
were unusual and characteristic.  Clay noticed this and appealed to him
from time to time, when he was in doubt; but the other only smiled back
and shook his head, as much as to say, "This is your city; they would
rather hear about it from you."

Clay took them to the principal shops, where the two girls held
whispered consultations over lace mantillas, which they had at once
determined to adopt, and bought the gorgeous paper fans, covered with
brilliant pictures of bull-fighters in suits of silver tinsel; and from
these open stores he led them to a dingy little shop, where there was
old silver and precious hand-painted fans of mother-of-pearl that had
been pawned by families who had risked and lost all in some revolution;
and then to another shop, where two old maiden ladies made a
particularly good guava; and to tobacconists, where the men bought a
few of the native cigars, which, as they were a monopoly of the
Government, were as bad as Government monopolies always are.

Clay felt a sudden fondness for the city, so grateful was he to it for
entertaining her as it did, and for putting its best front forward for
her delectation.  He wanted to thank some one for building the quaint
old convent, with its yellow walls washed to an orange tint, and black
in spots with dampness; and for the fountain covered with green moss
that stood before its gate, and around which were gathered the girls
and women of the neighborhood with red water-jars on their shoulders,
and little donkeys buried under stacks of yellow sugar-cane, and the
negro drivers of the city's green water-carts, and the blue wagons that
carried the manufactured ice.  Toward five o'clock they decided to
spend the rest of the day in the city, and to telephone for the two
boys to join them at La Venus, the great restaurant on the plaza, where
Clay had invited them to dine.

He suggested that they should fill out the time meanwhile by a call on
the President, and after a search for cards in various pocketbooks,
they drove to the Government palace, which stood in an open square in
the heart of the city.

As they arrived the President and his wife were leaving for their
afternoon drive on the Alameda, the fashionable parade-ground of the
city, and the state carriage and a squad of cavalry appeared from the
side of the palace as the visitors drove up to the entrance.  But at
the sight of Clay, General Alvarez and his wife retreated to the house
again and made them welcome.  The President led the men into his
reception-room and entertained them with champagne and cigarettes, not
manufactured by his Government; and his wife, after first conducting
the girls through the state drawing-room, where the late sunlight shone
gloomily on strange old portraits of assassinated presidents and
victorious generals, and garish yellow silk furniture, brought them to
her own apartments, and gave them tea after a civilized fashion, and
showed them how glad she was to see some one of her own world again.

During their short visit Madame Alvarez talked a greater part of the
time herself, addressing what she said to Miss Langham, but looking at
Hope.  It was unusual for Hope to be singled out in this way when her
sister was present, and both the sisters noticed it and spoke of it
afterwards.  They thought Madame Alvarez very beautiful and
distinguished-looking, and she impressed them, even after that short
knowledge of her, as a woman of great force of character.

"She was very well dressed for a Spanish woman," was Miss Langham's
comment, later in the afternoon.  "But everything she had on was just a
year behind the fashions, or twelve steamer days behind, as Mr.
MacWilliams puts it."

"She reminded me," said Hope, "of a black panther I saw once in a
circus."

"Dear me!" exclaimed the sister, "I don't see that at all. Why?"

Hope said she did not know why; she was not given to analyzing her
impressions or offering reasons for them.  "Because the panther looked
so unhappy," she explained, doubtfully, "and restless; and he kept
pacing up and down all the time, and hitting his head against the bars
as he walked as though he liked the pain.  Madame Alvarez seemed to me
to be just like that--as though she were shut up somewhere and wanted
to be free."

When Madame Alvarez and the two sisters had joined the men, they all
walked together to the terrace, and the visitors waited until the
President and his wife should take their departure.  Hope noticed, in
advance of the escort of native cavalry, an auburn-haired, fair-skinned
young man who was sitting an English saddle.

The officer's eyes were blue and frank and attractive-looking, even as
they then were fixed ahead of him with a military lack of expression;
but he came to life very suddenly when the President called to him, and
prodded his horse up to the steps and dismounted.  He was introduced by
Alvarez as "Captain Stuart of my household troops, late of the Gordon
Highlanders.  Captain Stuart," said the President, laying his hand
affectionately on the younger man's epaulette, "takes care of my life
and the safety of my home and family.  He could have the command of the
army if he wished; but no, he is fond of us, and he tells me we are in
more need of protection from our friends at home than from our enemies
on the frontier.  Perhaps he knows best.  I trust him, Mr. Langham,"
added the President, solemnly, "as I trust no other man in all this
country."

"I am very glad to meet Captain Stuart, I am sure," said Mr. Langham,
smiling, and appreciating how the shyness of the Englishman must be
suffering under the praises of the Spaniard. And Stuart was indeed so
embarrassed that he flushed under his tan, and assured Clay, while
shaking hands with them all, that he was delighted to make his
acquaintance; at which the others laughed, and Stuart came to himself
sufficiently to laugh with them, and to accept Clay's invitation to
dine with them later.

They found the two boys waiting in the caf; of the restaurant where
they had arranged to meet, and they ascended the steps together to the
table on the balcony that Clay had reserved for them.

The young engineer appeared at his best as host.  The responsibility of
seeing that a half-dozen others were amused and content sat well upon
him; and as course followed course, and the wines changed, and the
candles left the rest of the room in darkness and showed only the table
and the faces around it, they all became rapidly more merry and the
conversation intimately familiar.

Clay knew the kind of table-talk to which the Langhams were accustomed,
and used the material around his table in such a way that the talk
there was vastly different.  From King he drew forth tales of the
buried cities he had first explored, and then robbed of their ugliest
idols.  He urged MacWilliams to tell carefully edited stories of life
along the Chagres before the Scandal came, and of the fastnesses of the
Andes; and even Stuart grew braver and remembered "something of the
same sort" he had seen at Fort Nilt, in Upper Burma.

"Of course," was Clay's comment at the conclusion of one of these
narratives, "being an Englishman, Stuart left out the point of the
story, which was that he blew in the gates of the fort with a charge of
dynamite.  He got a D. S. O. for doing it."

"Being an Englishman," said Hope, smiling encouragingly on the
conscious Stuart, "he naturally would leave that out."

Mr. Langham and his daughters formed an eager audience.  They had never
before met at one table three men who had known such experiences, and
who spoke of them as though they must be as familiar in the lives of
the others as in their own--men who spoiled in the telling stories that
would have furnished incidents for melodramas, and who impressed their
hearers more with what they left unsaid, and what was only suggested,
than what in their view was the most important point.

The dinner came to an end at last, and Mr. Langham proposed that they
should go down and walk with the people in the plaza; but his two
daughters preferred to remain as spectators on the balcony, and Clay
and Stuart stayed with them.

"At last!" sighed Clay, under his breath, seating himself at Miss
Langham's side as she sat leaning forward with her arms upon the
railing and looking down into the plaza below.  She made no sign at
first that she had heard him, but as the voices of Stuart and Hope rose
from the other end of the balcony she turned her head and asked, "Why
at last?"

"Oh, you couldn't understand," laughed Clay.  "You have not been
looking forward to just one thing and then had it come true. It is the
only thing that ever did come true to me, and I thought it never would."

"You don't try to make me understand," said the girl, smiling, but
without turning her eyes from the moving spectacle below her.  Clay
considered her challenge silently.  He did not know just how much it
might mean from her, and the smile robbed it of all serious intent; so
he, too, turned and looked down into the great square below them,
content, now that she was alone with him, to take his time.

At one end of the plaza the President's band was playing native waltzes
that came throbbing through the trees and beating softly above the
rustling skirts and clinking spurs of the senoritas and officers,
sweeping by in two opposite circles around the edges of the tessellated
pavements.  Above the palms around the square arose the dim, white
facade of the cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella, the
liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and cocked hat
the cheers of an imaginary populace.  Clay's had been an unobtrusive
part in the evening's entertainment, but he saw that the others had
been pleased, and felt a certain satisfaction in thinking that King
himself could not have planned and carried out a dinner more admirable
in every way.  He was gratified that they should know him to be not
altogether a barbarian.  But what he best liked to remember was that
whenever he had spoken she had listened, even when her eyes were turned
away and she was pretending to listen to some one else.  He tormented
himself by wondering whether this was because he interested her only as
a new and strange character, or whether she felt in some way how
eagerly he was seeking her approbation.  For the first time in his life
he found himself considering what he was about to say, and he suited it
for her possible liking.  It was at least some satisfaction that she
had, if only for the time being, singled him out as of especial
interest, and he assured himself that the fault would be his if her
interest failed.  He no longer looked on himself as an outsider.

Stuart's voice arose from the farther end of the balcony, where the
white figure of Hope showed dimly in the darkness.

"They are talking about you over there," said Miss Langham, turning
toward him.

"Well, I don't mind," answered Clay, "as long as they talk about
me--over there."

Miss Langham shook her head.  "You are very frank and audacious," she
replied, doubtfully, "but it is rather pleasant as a change."

"I don't call that audacious, to say I don't want to be interrupted
when I am talking to you.  Aren't the men you meet generally
audacious?" he asked.  "I can see why not--though," he continued, "you
awe them."

"I can't think that's a nice way to affect people," protested Miss
Langham, after a pause.  "I don't awe you, do I?"

"Oh, you affect me in many different ways," returned Clay, cheerfully.
"Sometimes I am very much afraid of you, and then again my feelings are
only those of unlimited admiration."

"There, again, what did I tell you?" said Miss Langham.

"Well, I can't help doing that," said Clay.  "That is one of the few
privileges that is left to a man in my position--it doesn't matter what
I say.  That is the advantage of being of no account and hopelessly
detrimental.  The eligible men of the world, you see, have to be so
very careful.  A Prime Minister, for instance, can't talk as he wishes,
and call names if he wants to, or write letters, even.  Whatever he
says is so important, because he says it, that he must be very
discreet.  I am so unimportant that no one minds what I say, and so I
say it.  It's the only comfort I have."

"Are you in the habit of going around the world saying whatever you
choose to every woman you happen to--to--" Miss Langham hesitated.

"To admire very much," suggested Clay.

"To meet," corrected Miss Langham.  "Because, if you are, it is a very
dangerous and selfish practice, and I think your theory of
non-responsibility is a very wicked one."

"Well, I wouldn't say it to a child," mused Clay, "but to one who must
have heard it before--"

"And who, you think, would like to hear it again, perhaps," interrupted
Miss Langham.

"No, not at all," said Clay.  "I don't say it to give her pleasure, but
because it gives me pleasure to say what I think."

"If we are to continue good friends, Mr. Clay," said Miss Langham, in
decisive tones, "we must keep our relationship on more of a social and
less of a personal basis.  It was all very well that first night I met
you," she went on, in a kindly tone.

"You rushed in then and by a sort of tour de force made me think a
great deal about myself and also about you.  Your stories of cherished
photographs and distant devotion and all that were very interesting;
but now we are to be together a great deal, and if we are to talk about
ourselves all the time, I for one shall grow very tired of it.  As a
matter of fact you don't know what your feelings are concerning me, and
until you do we will talk less about them and more about the things you
are certain of. When are you going to take us to the mines, for
instance, and who was Anduella, the Liberator of Olancho, on that
pedestal over there?  Now, isn't that much more instructive?"

Clay smiled grimly and made no answer, but sat with knitted brows
looking out across the trees of the plaza.  His face was so serious and
he was apparently giving such earnest consideration to what she had
said that Miss Langham felt an uneasy sense of remorse.  And, moreover,
the young man's profile, as he sat looking away from her, was very
fine, and the head on his broad shoulders was as well-modelled as the
head of an Athenian statue.

Miss Langham was not insensible to beauty of any sort, and she regarded
the profile with perplexity and with a softening spirit.

"You understand," she said, gently, being quite certain that she did
not understand this new order of young man herself. "You are not
offended with me?" she asked.

Clay turned and frowned, and then smiled in a puzzled way and stretched
out his hand toward the equestrian statue in the plaza.

"Andulla or Anduella, the Treaty-Maker, as they call him, was born in
1700," he said; "he was a most picturesque sort of a chap, and freed
this country from the yoke of Spain.  One of the stories they tell of
him gives you a good idea of his character."  And so, without any
change of expression or reference to what had just passed between them,
Clay continued through the remainder of their stay on the balcony to
discourse in humorous, graphic phrases on the history of Olancho, its
heroes, and its revolutions, the buccaneers and pirates of the old
days, and the concession-hunters and filibusters of the present.  It
was some time before Miss Langham was able to give him her full
attention, for she was considering whether he could be so foolish as to
have taken offence at what she said, and whether he would speak of it
again, and in wondering whether a personal basis for conversation was
not, after all, more entertaining than anecdotes of the victories and
heroism of dead and buried Spaniards.

"That Captain Stuart," said Hope to her sister, as they drove home
together through the moonlight, "I like him very much.  He seems to
have such a simple idea of what is right and good.  It is like a child
talking.  Why, I am really much older than he is in everything but
years--why is that?"

"I suppose it's because we always talk before you as though you were a
grown-up person," said her sister.  "But I agree with you about Captain
Stuart; only, why is he down here?  If he is a gentleman, why is he not
in his own army?  Was he forced to leave it?"

"Oh, he seems to have a very good position here," said Mr. Langham.
"In England, at his age, he would be only a second-lieutenant.  Don't
you remember what the President said, that he would trust him with the
command of his army?  That's certainly a responsible position, and it
shows great confidence in him."

"Not so great, it seems to me," said King, carelessly, "as he is
showing him in making him the guardian of his hearth and home. Did you
hear what he said to-day?  'He guards my home and my family.'  I don't
think a man's home and family are among the things he can afford to
leave to the protection of stray English subalterns.  From all I hear,
it would be better if President Alvarez did less plotting and protected
his own house himself."

"The young man did not strike me as the sort of person," said Mr.
Langham, warmly, "who would be likely to break his word to the man who
is feeding him and sheltering him, and whose uniform he wears.  I don't
think the President's home is in any danger from within.  Madame
Alvarez--"

Clay turned suddenly in his place on the box-seat of the carriage,
where he had been sitting, a silent, misty statue in the moonlight, and
peered down on those in the carriage below him.

"Madame Alvarez needs no protection, as you were about to say, Mr.
Langham," he interrupted, quickly.  "Those who know her could say
nothing against her, and those who do not know her would not so far
forget themselves as to dare to do it.  Have you noticed the effect of
the moonlight on the walls of the convent?" he continued, gently.  "It
makes them quite white."

"No," exclaimed Mr. Langham and King, hurriedly, as they both turned
and gazed with absorbing interest at the convent on the hills above
them.

Before the sisters went to sleep that night Hope came to the door of
her sister's room and watched Alice admiringly as she sat before the
mirror brushing out her hair.

"I think it's going to be fine down here; don't you, Alice?" she asked.
"Everything is so different from what it is at home, and so beautiful,
and I like the men we've met.  Isn't that Mr. MacWilliams funny--and he
is so tough.  And Captain Stuart--it is a pity he's shy.  The only
thing he seems to be able to talk about is Mr. Clay.  He worships Mr.
Clay!"

"Yes," assented her sister, "I noticed on the balcony that you seemed
to have found some way to make him speak."

"Well, that was it.  He likes to talk about Mr. Clay, and I wanted to
listen.  Oh! he is a fine man.  He has done more exciting things--"

"Who?  Captain Stuart?"

"No--Mr. Clay.  He's been in three real wars and about a dozen little
ones, and he's built thousands of miles of railroads, I don't know how
many thousands, but Captain Stuart knows; and he built the highest
bridge in Peru.  It swings in the air across a chasm, and it rocks when
the wind blows.  And the German Emperor made him a Baron."

"Why?"

"I don't know.  I couldn't understand.  It was something about plans
for fortifications.  He, Mr. Clay, put up a fort in the harbor of Rio
Janeiro during a revolution, and the officers on a German man-of-war
saw it and copied the plans, and the Germans built one just like it,
only larger, on the Baltic, and when the Emperor found out whose design
it was, he sent Mr. Clay the order of something-or-other, and made him
a Baron."

"Really," exclaimed the elder sister, "isn't he afraid that some one
will marry him for his title?"

"Oh, well, you can laugh, but I think it's pretty fine, and so does
Ted," added Hope, with the air of one who propounds a final argument.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," laughed Alice.  "If Ted approves we must all
go down and worship."

"And father, too," continued Hope.  "He said he thought Mr. Clay was
one of the most remarkable men for his years that he had ever met."

Miss Langham's eyes were hidden by the masses of her black hair that
she had shaken over her face, and she said nothing.

"And I liked the way he shut Reggie King up too," continued Hope,
stoutly, "when he and father were talking that way about Madame
Alvarez."

"Yes, upon my word," exclaimed her sister, impatiently tossing her hair
back over her shoulders.  "I really cannot see that Madame Alvarez is
in need of any champion.  I thought Mr. Clay made it very much worse by
rushing in the way he did.  Why should he take it upon himself to
correct a man as old as my father?"

"I suppose because Madame Alvarez is a friend of his," Hope answered.

"My dear child, a beautiful woman can always find some man to take her
part," said Miss Langham.  "But I've no doubt," she added, rising and
kissing her sister good-night, "that he is all that your Captain Stuart
thinks him; but he is not going to keep us awake any longer, is he,
even if he does show such gallant interest in old ladies?"

"Old ladies!" exclaimed Hope in amazement.

"Why, Alice!"

But her sister only laughed and waved her out of the room, and Hope
walked away frowning in much perplexity.



V

The visit to the city was imitated on the three succeeding evenings by
similar excursions.  On one night they returned to the plaza, and the
other two were spent in drifting down the harbor and along the coast on
King's yacht.  The President and Madame Alvarez were King's guests on
one of these moonlight excursions, and were saluted by the proper
number of guns, and their native band played on the forward deck.  Clay
felt that King held the centre of the stage for the time being, and
obliterated himself completely.  He thought of his own paddle-wheel
tug-boat that he had had painted and gilded in her honor, and smiled
grimly.

MacWilliams approached him as he sat leaning back on the rail and
looking up, with the eye of a man who had served before the mast, at
the lacework of spars and rigging above him.  MacWilliams came toward
him on tiptoe and dropped carefully into a wicker chair. "There don't
seem to be any door-mats on this boat," he said. "In every other
respect she seems fitted out quite complete; all the latest magazines
and enamelled bathtubs, and Chinese waiter-boys with cock-tails up
their sleeves.  But there ought to be a mat at the top of each of those
stairways that hang over the side, otherwise some one is sure to soil
the deck.  Have you been down in the engine-room yet?" he asked. "Well,
don't go, then," he advised, solemnly.  "It will only make you feel
badly.  I have asked the Admiral if I can send those half-breed engine
drivers over to-morrow to show them what a clean engine-room looks
like.  I've just been talking to the chief.  His name's MacKenzie, and
I told him I was Scotch myself, and he said it 'was a greet pleesure'
to find a gentleman so well acquainted with the movements of machinery.
He thought I was one of King's friends, I guess, so I didn't tell him I
pulled a lever for a living myself.  I gave him a cigar though, and he
said, 'Thankee, sir,' and touched his cap to me."

MacWilliams chuckled at the recollection, and crossed his legs
comfortably.  "One of King's cigars, too," he said.  "Real Havana; he
leaves them lying around loose in the cabin.  Have you had one?  Ted
Langham and I took about a box between us."

Clay made no answer, and MacWilliams settled himself contentedly in the
great wicker chair and puffed grandly on a huge cigar.

"It's demoralizing, isn't it?" he said at last.

"What?" asked Clay, absently.

"Oh, this associating with white people again, as we're doing now.  It
spoils you for tortillas and rice, doesn't it?  It's going to be great
fun while it lasts, but when they've all gone, and Ted's gone, too, and
the yacht's vanished, and we fall back to tramping around the plaza
twice a week, it won't be gay, will it?  No; it won't be gay.  We're
having the spree of our lives now, I guess, but there's going to be a
difference in the morning."

"Oh, it's worth a headache, I think," said Clay, as he shrugged his
shoulders and walked away to find Miss Langham.

The day set for the visit to the mines rose bright and clear.
MacWilliams had rigged out his single passenger-car with rugs and
cushions, and flags flew from its canvas top that flapped and billowed
in the wind of the slow-moving train.  Their observation-car, as
MacWilliams termed it, was placed in front of the locomotive, and they
were pushed gently along the narrow rails between forests of Manaca
palms, and through swamps and jungles, and at times over the limestone
formation along the coast, where the waves dashed as high as the
smokestack of the locomotive, covering the excursionists with a
sprinkling of white spray.  Thousands of land-crabs, painted red and
black and yellow, scrambled with a rattle like dead men's bones across
the rails to be crushed by the hundreds under the wheels of the
Juggernaut; great lizards ran from sunny rocks at the sound of their
approach, and a deer bounded across the tracks fifty feet in front of
the cow-catcher.  MacWilliams escorted Hope out into the cab of the
locomotive, and taught her how to increase and slacken the speed of the
engine, until she showed an unruly desire to throw the lever open
altogether and shoot them off the rails into the ocean beyond.

Clay sat at the back of the car with Miss Langham, and told her and her
father of the difficulties with which young MacWilliams had had to
contend.  Miss Langham found her chief pleasure in noting the attention
which her father gave to all that Clay had to tell him.  Knowing her
father as she did, and being familiar with his manner toward other men,
she knew that he was treating Clay with unusual consideration.  And
this pleased her greatly, for it justified her own interest in him.
She regarded Clay as a discovery of her own, but she was glad to have
her opinion of him shared by others.

Their coming was a great event in the history of the mines. Kirkland,
the foreman, and Chapman, who handled the dynamite, Weimer, the Consul,
and the native doctor, who cared for the fever-stricken and the
casualties, were all at the station to meet them in the whitest of
white duck and with a bunch of ponies to carry them on their tour of
inspection, and the village of mud-cabins and zinc-huts that stood
clear of the bare sunbaked earth on whitewashed wooden piles was as
clean as Clay's hundred policemen could sweep it.  Mr. Langham rode in
advance of the cavalcade, and the head of each of the different
departments took his turn in riding at his side, and explained what had
been done, and showed him the proud result.  The village was empty,
except for the families of the native workmen and the ownerless dogs,
the scavengers of the colony, that snarled and barked and ran leaping
in front of the ponies' heads.

Rising abruptly above the zinc village, lay the first of the five great
hills, with its open front cut into great terraces, on which the men
clung like flies on the side of a wall, some of them in groups around
an opening, or in couples pounding a steel bar that a fellow-workman
turned in his bare hands, while others gathered about the panting
steam-drills that shook the solid rock with fierce, short blows, and
hid the men about them in a throbbing curtain of steam.  Self-important
little dummy-engines, dragging long trains of ore-cars, rolled and
rocked on the uneven surface of the ground, and swung around corners
with warning screeches of their whistles.  They could see, on peaks
outlined against the sky, the signal-men waving their red flags, and
then plunging down the mountain-side out of danger, as the earth
rumbled and shook and vomited out a shower of stones and rubbish into
the calm hot air.  It was a spectacle of desperate activity and
puzzling to the uninitiated, for it seemed to be scattered over an
unlimited extent, with no head nor direction, and with each man, or
each group of men, working alone, like rag-pickers on a heap of ashes.

After the first half-hour of curious interest Miss Langham admitted to
herself that she was disappointed.  She confessed she had hoped that
Clay would explain the meaning of the mines to her, and act as her
escort over the mountains which he was blowing into pieces.

But it was King, somewhat bored by the ceaseless noise and heat, and
her brother, incoherently enthusiastic, who rode at her side, while
Clay moved on in advance and seemed to have forgotten her existence.
She watched him pointing up at the openings in the mountains and down
at the ore-road, or stooping to pick up a piece of ore from the ground
in cowboy fashion, without leaving his saddle, and pounding it on the
pommel before he passed it to the others.  And, again, he would stand
for minutes at a time up to his boot-tops in the sliding waste, with
his bridle rein over his arm and his thumbs in his belt, listening to
what his lieutenants were saying, and glancing quickly from them to Mr.
Langham to see if he were following the technicalities of their speech.
All of the men who had welcomed the appearance of the women on their
arrival with such obvious delight and with so much embarrassment seemed
now as oblivious of their presence as Clay himself.

Miss Langham pushed her horse up into the group beside Hope, who had
kept her pony close at Clay's side from the beginning; but she could
not make out what it was they were saying, and no one seemed to think
it necessary to explain.  She caught Clay's eye at last and smiled
brightly at him; but, after staring at her for fully a minute, until
Kirkland had finished speaking, she heard him say, "Yes, that's it
exactly; in open-face workings there is no other way," and so showed
her that he had not been even conscious of her presence.  But a few
minutes later she saw him look up at Hope, folding his arms across his
chest tightly and shaking his head.  "You see it was the only thing to
do," she heard him say, as though he were defending some course of
action, and as though Hope were one of those who must be convinced.
"If we had cut the opening on the first level, there was the danger of
the whole thing sinking in, so we had to begin to clear away at the top
and work down.  That's why I ordered the bucket-trolley.  As it turned
out, we saved money by it."

Hope nodded her head slightly.  "That's what I told father when Ted
wrote us about it," she said; "but you haven't done it at Mount
Washington."

"Oh, but it's like this, Miss--" Kirkland replied, eagerly. "It's
because Washington is a solider foundation.  We can cut openings all
over it and they won't cave, but this hill is most all rubbish; it's
the poorest stuff in the mines."

Hope nodded her head again and crowded her pony on after the moving
group, but her sister and King did not follow.  King looked at her and
smiled.  "Hope is very enthusiastic," he said.  "Where did she pick it
up?"

"Oh, she and father used to go over it in his study last winter after
Ted came down here," Miss Langham answered, with a touch of impatience
in her tone.  "Isn't there some place where we can go to get out of
this heat?"

Weimer, the Consul, heard her and led her back to Kirkland's bungalow,
that hung like an eagle's nest from a projecting cliff. From its porch
they could look down the valley over the greater part of the mines, and
beyond to where the Caribbean Sea lay flashing in the heat.

"I saw very few Americans down there, Weimer," said King.  "I thought
Clay had imported a lot of them."

"About three hundred altogether, wild Irishmen and negroes," said the
Consul; "but we use the native soldiers chiefly.  They can stand the
climate better, and, besides," he added, "they act as a reserve in case
of trouble.  They are Mendoza's men, and Clay is trying to win them
away from him."

"I don't understand," said King.

Weimer looked around him and waited until Kirkland's servant had
deposited a tray full of bottles and glasses on a table near them, and
had departed.  "The talk is," he said, "that Alvarez means to proclaim
a dictatorship in his own favor before the spring elections.  You've
heard of that, haven't you?" King shook his head.

"Oh, tell us about it," said Miss Langham; "I should so like to be in
plots and conspiracies."

"Well, they're rather common down here," continued the Consul, "but
this one ought to interest you especially, Miss Langham, because it is
a woman who is at the head of it.  Madame Alvarez, you know, was the
Countess Manueleta Hernandez before her marriage.  She belongs to one
of the oldest families in Spain.  Alvarez married her in Madrid, when
he was Minister there, and when he returned to run for President, she
came with him.  She's a tremendously ambitious woman, and they do say
she wants to convert the republic into a monarchy, and make her husband
King, or, more properly speaking, make herself Queen.  Of course that's
absurd, but she is supposed to be plotting to turn Olancho into a sort
of dependency of Spain, as it was long ago, and that's why she is so
unpopular."

"Indeed?" interrupted Miss Langham, "I did not know that she was
unpopular."

"Oh, rather.  Why, her party is called the Royalist Party already, and
only a week before you came the Liberals plastered the city with
denunciatory placards against her, calling on the people to drive her
out of the country."

"What cowards--to fight a woman!" exclaimed Miss Langham.

"Well, she began it first, you see," said the Consul.

"Who is the leader of the fight against her?" asked King.

"General Mendoza; he is commander-in-chief and has the greater part of
the army with him, but the other candidate, old General Rojas, is the
popular choice and the best of the three. He is Vice-President now, and
if the people were ever given a fair chance to vote for the man they
want, he would unquestionably be the next President.  The mass of the
people are sick of revolutions.  They've had enough of them, but they
will have to go through another before long, and if it turns against
Dr. Alvarez, I'm afraid Mr. Langham will have hard work to hold these
mines.  You see, Mendoza has already threatened to seize the whole
plant and turn it into a Government monopoly."

"And if the other one, General Rojas, gets into power, will he seize
the mines, too?"

"No, he is honest, strange to relate," laughed Weimer, "but he won't
get in.  Alvarez will make himself dictator, or Mendoza will make
himself President.  That's why Clay treats the soldiers here so well.
He thinks he may need them against Mendoza.  You may be turning your
saluting-gun on the city yet, Commodore," he added, smiling, "or, what
is more likely, you'll need the yacht to take Miss Langham and the rest
of the family out of the country."

King smiled and Miss Langham regarded Weimer with flattering interest.
"I've got a quick firing gun below decks," said King, "that I used in
the Malaysian Peninsula on a junkful of Black Flags, and I think I'll
have it brought up.  And there are about thirty of my men on the yacht
who wouldn't ask for their wages in a year if I'd let them go on shore
and mix up in a fight.  When do you suppose this--"

A heavy step and the jingle of spurs on the bare floor of the bungalow
startled the conspirators, and they turned and gazed guiltily out at
the mountain-tops above them as Clay came hurrying out upon the porch.

"They told me you were here," he said, speaking to Miss Langham.  "I'm
so sorry it tired you.  I should have remembered--it is a rough trip
when you're not used to it," he added, remorsefully.  "But I'm glad
Weimer was here to take care of you."

"It was just a trifle hot and noisy," said Miss Langham, smiling
sweetly.  She put her hand to her forehead with an expression of
patient suffering.  "It made my head ache a little, but it was most
interesting."  She added, "You are certainly to be congratulated on
your work."

Clay glanced at her doubtfully with a troubled look, and turned away
his eyes to the busy scene below him.  He was greatly hurt that she
should have cared so little, and indignant at himself for being so
unjust.  Why should he expect a woman to find interest in that hive of
noise and sweating energy?  But even as he stood arguing with himself
his eyes fell on a slight figure sitting erect and graceful on her
pony's back, her white habit soiled and stained red with the ore of the
mines, and green where it had crushed against the leaves.  She was
coming slowly up the trail with a body-guard of half a dozen men
crowding closely around her, telling her the difficulties of the work,
and explaining their successes, and eager for a share of her quick
sympathy.

Clay's eyes fixed themselves on the picture, and he smiled at its
significance.  Miss Langham noticed the look, and glanced below to see
what it was that had so interested him, and then back at him again.  He
was still watching the approaching cavalcade intently, and smiling to
himself.  Miss Langham drew in her breath and raised her head and
shoulders quickly, like a deer that hears a footstep in the forest, and
when Hope presently stepped out upon the porch, she turned quickly
toward her, and regarded her steadily, as though she were a stranger to
her, and as though she were trying to see her with the eyes of one who
looked at her for the first time.

"Hope!" she said, "do look at your dress!"

Hope's face was glowing with the unusual exercise, and her eyes were
brilliant.  Her hair had slipped down beneath the visor of her helmet.

"I am so tired--and so hungry."  She was laughing and looking directly
at Clay.  "It has been a wonderful thing to have seen," she said,
tugging at her heavy gauntlet, "and to have done," she added.  She
pulled off her glove and held out her hand to Clay, moist and scarred
with the pressure of the reins.

"Thank you," she said, simply.

The master of the mines took it with a quick rush of gratitude, and
looking into the girl's eyes, saw something there that startled him, so
that he glanced quickly past her at the circle of booted men grouped in
the door behind her.  They were each smiling in appreciation of the
tableau; her father and Ted, MacWilliams and Kirkland, and all the
others who had helped him. They seemed to envy, but not to grudge, the
whole credit which the girl had given to him.

Clay thought, "Why could it not have been the other?"  But he said
aloud, "Thank YOU.  You have given me my reward."

Miss Langham looked down impatiently into the valley below, and found
that it seemed more hot and noisy, and more grimy than before.



VI

Clay believed that Alice Langham's visit to the mines had opened his
eyes fully to vast differences between them.  He laughed and railed at
himself for having dared to imagine that he was in a position to care
for her.  Confident as he was at times, and sure as he was of his
ability in certain directions, he was uneasy and fearful when he
matched himself against a man of gentle birth and gentle breeding, and
one who, like King, was part of a world of which he knew little, and to
which, in his ignorance concerning it, he attributed many advantages
that it did not possess.  He believed that he would always lack the
mysterious something which these others held by right of inheritance.
He was still young and full of the illusions of youth, and so gave
false values to his own qualities, and values equally false to the
qualities he lacked.  For the next week he avoided Miss Langham, unless
there were other people present, and whenever she showed him special
favor, he hastily recalled to his mind her failure to sympathize in his
work, and assured himself that if she could not interest herself in the
engineer, he did not care to have her interested in the man.  Other
women had found him attractive in himself; they had cared for his
strength of will and mind, and because he was good to look at.  But he
determined that this one must sympathize with his work in the world, no
matter how unpicturesque it might seem to her.  His work was the best
of him, he assured himself, and he would stand or fall with it.

It was a week after the visit to the mines that President Alvarez gave
a great ball in honor of the Langhams, to which all of the important
people of Olancho, and the Foreign Ministers were invited.  Miss
Langham met Clay on the afternoon of the day set for the ball, as she
was going down the hill to join Hope and her father at dinner on the
yacht.

"Are you not coming, too?" she asked.

"I wish I could," Clay answered.  "King asked me, but a steamer-load of
new machinery arrived to-day, and I have to see it through the
Custom-House."

Miss Langham gave an impatient little laugh, and shook her head. "You
might wait until we were gone before you bother with your machinery,"
she said.

"When you are gone I won't be in a state of mind to attend to machinery
or anything else," Clay answered.

Miss Langham seemed so far encouraged by this speech that she seated
herself in the boathouse at the end of the wharf.  She pushed her
mantilla back from her face and looked up at him, smiling brightly.

"'The time has come, the walrus said,'" she quoted, "'to talk of many
things.'"

Clay laughed and dropped down beside her.  "Well?" he said.

"You have been rather unkind to me this last week," the girl began,
with her eyes fixed steadily on his.  "And that day at the mines when I
counted on you so, you acted abominably."

Clay's face showed so plainly his surprise at this charge, which he
thought he only had the right to make, that Miss Langham stopped.

"I don't understand," said Clay, quietly.  "How did I treat you
abominably?"

He had taken her so seriously that Miss Langham dropped her lighter
tone and spoke in one more kindly:

"I went out there to see your work at its best.  I was only interested
in going because it was your work, and because it was you who had done
it all, and I expected that you would try to explain it to me and help
me to understand, but you didn't.  You treated me as though I had no
interest in the matter at all, as though I was not capable of
understanding it.  You did not seem to care whether I was interested or
not.  In fact, you forgot me altogether."

Clay exhibited no evidence of a reproving conscience.  "I am sorry you
had a stupid time," he said, gravely.

"I did not mean that, and you know I didn't mean that," the girl
answered.  "I wanted to hear about it from you, because you did it.  I
wasn't interested so much in what had been done, as I was in the man
who had accomplished it."

Clay shrugged his shoulders impatiently, and looked across at Miss
Langham with a troubled smile.

"But that's just what I don't want," he said.  "Can't you see? These
mines and other mines like them are all I have in the world.  They are
my only excuse for having lived in it so long. I want to feel that I've
done something outside of myself, and when you say that you like me
personally, it's as little satisfaction to me as it must be to a woman
to be congratulated on her beauty, or on her fine voice.  That is
nothing she has done herself.  I should like you to value what I have
done, not what I happen to be."

Miss Langham turned her eyes to the harbor, and it was some short time
before she answered.

"You are a very difficult person to please," she said, "and most
exacting.  As a rule men are satisfied to be liked for any reason.  I
confess frankly, since you insist upon it, that I do not rise to the
point of appreciating your work as the others do.  I suppose it is a
fault," she continued, with an air that plainly said that she
considered it, on the contrary, something of a virtue.  "And if I knew
more about it technically, I might see more in it to admire.  But I am
looking farther on for better things from you.  The friends who help us
the most are not always those who consider us perfect, are they?" she
asked, with a kindly smile.  She raised her eyes to the great ore-pier
that stretched out across the water, the one ugly blot in the scene of
natural beauty about them.  "I think that is all very well," she said;
"but I certainly expect you to do more than that.  I have met many
remarkable men in all parts of the world, and I know what a strong man
is, and you have one of the strongest personalities I have known.  But
you can't mean that you are content to stop with this.  You should be
something bigger and more wide-reaching and more lasting.  Indeed, it
hurts me to see you wasting your time here over my father's interests.
You should exert that same energy on a broader map.  You could make
yourself anything you chose.  At home you would be your party's leader
in politics, or you could be a great general, or a great financier.  I
say this because I know there are better things in you, and because I
want you to make the most of your talents.  I am anxious to see you put
your powers to something worth while."

Miss Langham's voice carried with it such a tone of sincerity that she
almost succeeded in deceiving herself.  And yet she would have hardly
cared to explain just why she had reproached the man before her after
this fashion.  For she knew that when she spoke as she had done, she
was beating about to find some reason that would justify her in not
caring for him, as she knew she could care--as she would not allow
herself to care.  The man at her side had won her interest from the
first, and later had occupied her thoughts so entirely, that it
troubled her peace of mind.  Yet she would not let her feeling for him
wax and grow stronger, but kept it down.  And she was trying now to
persuade herself that she did this because there was something lacking
in him and not in her.

She was almost angry with him for being so much to her and for not
being more acceptable in little things, like the other men she knew.
So she found this fault with him in order that she might justify her
own lack of feeling.

But Clay, who only heard the words and could not go back of them to
find the motive, could not know this.  He sat perfectly still when she
had finished and looked steadily out across the harbor.  His eyes fell
on the ugly ore-pier, and he winced and uttered a short grim laugh.

"That's true, what you say," he began, "I haven't done much. You are
quite right.  Only--" he looked up at her curiously and smiled--"only
you should not have been the one to tell me of it."

Miss Langham had been so far carried away by her own point of view that
she had not considered Clay, and now that she saw what mischief she had
done, she gave a quick gasp of regret, and leaned forward as though to
add some explanation to what she had said.  But Clay stopped her.  "I
mean by that," he said, "that the great part of the inspiration I have
had to do what little I have done came from you.  You were a sort of
promise of something better to me.  You were more of a type than an
individual woman, but your picture, the one I carry in my watch, meant
all that part of life that I have never known, the sweetness and the
nobleness and grace of civilization,--something I hoped I would some
day have time to enjoy.  So you see," he added, with an uncertain
laugh, "it's less pleasant to hear that I have failed to make the most
of myself from you than from almost any one else."

"But, Mr. Clay," protested the girl, anxiously, "I think you have done
wonderfully well.  I only said that I wanted you to do more.  You are
so young and you have--"

Clay did not hear her.  He was leaning forward looking moodily out
across the water, with his folded arms clasped across his knees.

"I have not made the most of myself," he repeated; "that is what you
said."  He spoke the words as though she had delivered a sentence.
"You don't think well of what I have done, of what I am."

He drew in his breath and shook his head with a hopeless laugh, and
leaned back against the railing of the boat-house with the weariness in
his attitude of a man who has given up after a long struggle.

"No," he said with a bitter flippancy in his voice, "I don't amount to
much.  But, my God!" he laughed, and turning his head away, "when you
think what I was!  This doesn't seem much to you, and it doesn't seem
much to me now that I have your point of view on it, but when I
remember!"  Clay stopped again and pressed his lips together and shook
his head.  His half-closed eyes, that seemed to be looking back into
his past, lighted as they fell on King's white yacht, and he raised his
arm and pointed to it with a wave of the hand.  "When I was sixteen I
was a sailor before the mast," he said, "the sort of sailor that King's
crew out there wouldn't recognize in the same profession.  I was of so
little account that I've been knocked the length of the main deck at
the end of the mate's fist, and left to lie bleeding in the scuppers
for dead.  I hadn't a thing to my name then but the clothes I wore, and
I've had to go aloft in a hurricane and cling to a swinging rope with
my bare toes and pull at a wet sheet until my finger-nails broke and
started in their sockets; and I've been a cowboy, with no companions
for six months of the year but eight thousand head of cattle and men as
dumb and untamed as the steers themselves.  I've sat in my saddle night
after night, with nothing overhead but the stars, and no sound but the
noise of the steers breathing in their sleep.  The women I knew were
Indian squaws, and the girls of the sailors' dance-houses and the
gambling-hells of Sioux City and Abilene, and Callao and Port Said.
That was what I was and those were my companions.  Why!" he laughed,
rising and striding across the boat-house with his hands locked behind
him, "I've fought on the mud floor of a Mexican shack, with a naked
knife in my hand, for my last dollar.  I was as low and as desperate as
that.  And now--" Clay lifted his head and smiled.  "Now," he said, in
a lower voice and addressing Miss Langham with a return of his usual
grave politeness, "I am able to sit beside you and talk to you.  I have
risen to that.  I am quite content."

He paused and looked at Miss Langham uncertainly for a few moments as
though in doubt as to whether she would understand him if he continued.

"And though it means nothing to you," he said, "and though as you say I
am here as your father's employee, there are other places, perhaps,
where I am better known.  In Edinburgh or Berlin or Paris, if you were
to ask the people of my own profession, they could tell you something
of me.  If I wished it, I could drop this active work tomorrow and
continue as an adviser, as an expert, but I like the active part
better.  I like doing things myself.  I don't say, 'I am a salaried
servant of Mr. Langham's;' I put it differently.  I say, 'There are
five mountains of iron. You are to take them up and transport them from
South America to North America, where they will be turned into
railroads and ironclads.'  That's my way of looking at it.  It's better
to bind a laurel to the plough than to call yourself hard names.  It
makes your work easier--almost noble.  Cannot you see it that way, too?"

Before Miss Langham could answer, a deprecatory cough from one side of
the open boat-house startled them, and turning they saw MacWilliams
coming toward them.  They had been so intent upon what Clay was saying
that he had approached them over the soft sand of the beach without
their knowing it.  Miss Langham welcomed his arrival with evident
pleasure.

"The launch is waiting for you at the end of the pier," MacWilliams
said.  Miss Langham rose and the three walked together down the length
of the wharf, MacWilliams moving briskly in advance in order to enable
them to continue the conversation he had interrupted, but they followed
close behind him, as though neither of them were desirous of such an
opportunity.

Hope and King had both come for Miss Langham, and while the latter was
helping her to a place on the cushions, and repeating his regrets that
the men were not coming also, Hope started the launch, with a brisk
ringing of bells and a whirl of the wheel and a smile over her shoulder
at the figures on the wharf.

"Why didn't you go?" said Clay; "you have no business at the
Custom-House."

"Neither have you," said MacWilliams.  "But I guess we both understand.
There's no good pushing your luck too far."

"What do you mean by that--this time?"

"Why, what have we to do with all of this?" cried MacWilliams. "It's
what I keep telling you every day.  We're not in that class, and you're
only making it harder for yourself when they've gone.  I call it
cruelty to animals myself, having women like that around.  Up North,
where everybody's white, you don't notice it so much, but down
here--Lord!"

"That's absurd," Clay answered.  "Why should you turn your back on
civilization when it comes to you, just because you're not going back
to civilization by the next steamer?  Every person you meet either
helps you or hurts you.  Those girls help us, even if they do make the
life here seem bare and mean."

"Bare and mean!" repeated MacWilliams incredulously.  "I think that's
just what they don't do.  I like it all the better because they're
mixed up in it.  I never took so much interest in your mines until she
took to riding over them, and I didn't think great shakes of my old
ore-road, either, but now that she's got to acting as engineer, it's
sort of nickel-plated the whole outfit.  I'm going to name the new
engine after her--when it gets here--if her old man will let me."

"What do you mean?  Miss Langham hasn't been to the mines but once, has
she?"

"Miss Langham!" exclaimed MacWilliams. "No, I mean the other, Miss
Hope.  She comes out with Ted nearly every day now, and she's learning
how to run a locomotive.  Just for fun, you know," he added,
reassuringly.

"I didn't suppose she had any intention of joining the Brotherhood,"
said Clay.  "So she's been out every day, has she?  I like that," he
commented, enthusiastically.  "She's a fine, sweet girl."

"Fine, sweet girl!" growled MacWilliams.  "I should hope so. She's the
best.  They don't make them any better than that, and just think, if
she's like that now, what will she be when she's grown up, when she's
learned a few things?  Now her sister.  You can see just what her
sister will be at thirty, and at fifty, and at eighty.  She's
thoroughbred and she's the most beautiful woman to look at I ever
saw--but, my son--she is too careful.  She hasn't any illusions, and no
sense of humor.  And a woman with no illusions and no sense of humor is
going to be monotonous.  You can't teach her anything.  You can't
imagine yourself telling her anything she doesn't know.  The things we
think important don't reach her at all.  They're not in her line, and
in everything else she knows more than we could ever guess at.  But
that Miss Hope!  It's a privilege to show her about.  She wants to see
everything, and learn everything, and she goes poking her head into
openings and down shafts like a little fox terrier. And she'll sit
still and listen with her eyes wide open and tears in them, too, and
she doesn't know it--until you can't talk yourself for just looking at
her."

Clay rose and moved on to the house in silence.  He was glad that
MacWilliams had interrupted him when he did.  He wondered whether he
understood Alice Langham after all.  He had seen many fine ladies
before during his brief visits to London, and Berlin, and Vienna, and
they had shown him favor.  He had known other women not so fine.
Spanish-American senoritas through Central and South America, the wives
and daughters of English merchants exiled along the Pacific coast,
whose fair skin and yellow hair whitened and bleached under the hot
tropical suns.  He had known many women, and he could have quoted

    "Trials and troubles amany,
        Have proved me;
      One or two women, God bless them!
        Have loved me."

But the woman he was to marry must have all the things he lacked.

She must fill out and complete him where he was wanting.  This woman
possessed all of these things.  She appealed to every ambition and to
every taste he cherished, and yet he knew that he had hesitated and
mistrusted her, when he should have declared himself eagerly and
vehemently, and forced her to listen with all the strength of his will.


Miss Langham dropped among the soft cushions of the launch with a sense
of having been rescued from herself and of delight in finding refuge
again in her own environment.  The sight of King standing in the bow
beside Hope with his cigarette hanging from his lips, and peering with
half-closed eyes into the fading light, gave her a sense of restfulness
and content.  She did not know what she wished from that other strange
young man.  He was so bold, so handsome, and he looked at life and
spoke of it in such a fresh, unhackneyed spirit.  He might make himself
anything he pleased.  But here was a man who already had everything, or
who could get it as easily as he could increase the speed of the
launch, by pulling some wire with his finger.

She recalled one day when they were all on board of this same launch,
and the machinery had broken down, and MacWilliams had gone forward to
look at it.  He had called Clay to help him, and she remembered how
they had both gone down on their knees and asked the engineer and
fireman to pass them wrenches and oil-cans, while King protested
mildly, and the rest sat helplessly in the hot glare of the sea, as the
boat rose and fell on the waves.  She resented Clay's interest in the
accident, and his pleasure when he had made the machinery right once
more, and his appearance as he came back to them with oily hands and
with his face glowing from the heat of the furnace, wiping his grimy
fingers on a piece of packing.  She had resented the equality with
which he treated the engineer in asking his advice, and it rather
surprised her that the crew saluted him when he stepped into the launch
again that night as though he were the owner.  She had expected that
they would patronize him, and she imagined after this incident that she
detected a shade of difference in the manner of the sailors toward
Clay, as though he had cheapened himself to them--as he had to her.