Soldiers Of Fortune By Richard Harding Davis

SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE I “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 cafe’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 cafe’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 cafe’ 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 mudDcabins 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. VII At ten o’clock that same evening Clay began to prepare himself for the ball at the Government palace, and MacWilliams, who was not invited, watched him dress with critical approval that showed no sign of envy. The better to do honor to the President, Clay had brought out several foreign orders, and MacWilliams helped him to tie around his neck the collar of the Red Eagle which the German Emperor had given him, and to fasten the ribbon and cross of the Star of Olancho across his breast, and a Spanish Order and the Legion of Honor to the lapel of his coat. MacWilliams surveyed the effect of the tiny enamelled crosses with his head on one side, and with the same air of affectionate pride and concern that a mother shows over her daughter’s first ball-dress. “Got any more?” he asked, anxiously. “I have some war medals,” Clay answered, smiling doubtfully. “But I’m not in uniform.” “Oh, that’s all right,” declared MacWilliams. “Put ’em on, put ’em all on. Give the girls a treat. Everybody will think they were given for feats of swimming, anyway; but they will show up well from the front. Now, then, you look like a drum-major or a conjuring chap.” “I do not,” said Clay. “I look like a French Ambassador, and I hardly understand how you find courage to speak to me at all.” He went up the hill in high spirits, and found the carriage at the door and King, Mr. Langham, and Miss Langham sitting waiting for him. They were ready to depart, and Miss Langham had but just seated herself in the carriage when they heard hurrying across the tiled floor a quick, light step and the rustle of silk, and turning they saw Hope standing in the doorway, radiant and smiling. She wore a white frock that reached to the ground, and that left her arms and shoulders bare. Her hair was dressed high upon her head, and she was pulling vigorously at a pair of long, tan-colored gloves. The transformation was so complete, and the girl looked so much older and so stately and beautiful, that the two young men stared at her in silent admiration and astonishment. “Why, Hope!” exclaimed her sister. “What does this mean?” Hope stopped in some alarm, and clasped her hair with both hands. “What is it?” she asked; “is anything wrong?” “Why, my dear child,” said her sister, “you’re not thinking of going with us, are you?” “Not going?” echoed the younger sister, in dismay. “Why, Alice, why not? I was asked.” “But, Hope– Father,” said the elder sister, stepping out of the carriage and turning to Mr. Langham, “you didn’t intend that Hope should go, did you? She’s not out yet.” “Oh, nonsense,” said Hope, defiantly. But she drew in her breath quickly and blushed, as she saw the two young men moving away out of hearing of this family crisis. She felt that she was being made to look like a spoiled child. “It doesn’t count down here,” she said, “and I want to go. I thought you knew I was going all the time. Marie made this frock for me on purpose.” “I don’t think Hope is old enough,” the elder sister said, addressing her father, “and if she goes to dances here, there’s no reason why she should not go to those at home.” “But I don’t want to go to dances at home,” interrupted Hope. Mr. Langham looked exceedingly uncomfortable, and turned apppealingly to his elder daughter. “What do you think, Alice?” he said, doubtfully. “I’m sorry,” Miss Langham replied, “but I know it would not be at all proper. I hate to seem horrid about it, Hope, but indeed you are too young, and the men here are not the men a young girl ought to meet.” “You meet them, Alice,” said Hope, but pulling off her gloves in token of defeat. “But, my dear child, I’m fifty years older than you are.” “Perhaps Alice knows best, Hope,” Mr. Langham said. “I’m sorry if you are disappointed.” Hope held her head a little higher, and turned toward the door. “I don’t mind if you don’t wish it, father,” she said. “Good- night.” She moved away, but apparently thought better of it, and came back and stood smiling and nodding to them as they seated themselves in the carriage. Mr. Langham leaned forward and said, in a troubled voice, “We will tell you all about it in the morning. I’m very sorry. You won’t be lonely, will you? I’ll stay with you if you wish.” “Nonsense!” laughed Hope. “Why, it’s given to you, father; don’t bother about me. I’ll read something or other and go to bed.” “Good-night, Cinderella,” King called out to her. “Good-night, Prince Charming,” Hope answered. Both Clay and King felt that the girl would not mind missing the ball so much as she would the fact of having been treated like a child in their presence, so they refrained from any expression of sympathy or regret, but raised their hats and bowed a little more impressively than usual as the carriage drove away. The picture Hope made, as she stood deserted and forlorn on the steps of the empty house in her new finery, struck Clay as unnecessarily pathetic. He felt a strong sense of resentment against her sister and her father, and thanked heaven devoutly that he was out of their class, and when Miss Langham continued to express her sorrow that she had been forced to act as she had done, he remained silent. It seemed to Clay such a simple thing to give children pleasure, and to remember that their woes were always out of all proportion to the cause. Children, dumb animals, and blind people were always grouped together in his mind as objects demanding the most tender and constant consideration. So the pleasure of the evening was spoiled for him while he remembered the hurt and disappointed look in Hope’s face, and when Miss Langham asked him why he was so preoccupied, he told her bluntly that he thought she had been very unkind to Hope, and that her objections were absurd. Miss Langham held herself a little more stiffly. “Perhaps you do not quite understand, Mr. Clay,” she said. “Some of us have to conform to certain rules that the people with whom we best like to associate have laid down for themselves. If we choose to be conventional, it is probably because we find it makes life easier for the greater number. You cannot think it was a pleasant task for me. But I have given up things of much more importance than a dance for the sake of appearances, and Hope herself will see to-morrow that I acted for the best.” Clay said he trusted so, but doubted it, and by way of re- establishing himself in Miss Langham’s good favor, asked her if she could give him the next dance. But Miss Langham was not to be propitiated. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I believe I am engaged until supper-time. Come and ask me then, and I’ll have one saved for you. But there is something you can do,” she added. “I left my fan in the carriage–do you think you could manage to get it for me without much trouble?” “The carriage did not wait. I believe it was sent back,” said Clay, “but I can borrow a horse from one of Stuart’s men, and ride back and get it for you, if you like.” “How absurd!” laughed Miss Langham, but she looked pleased, notwithstanding. “Oh, not at all,” Clay answered. He was smiling down at her in some amusement, and was apparently much entertained at his idea. “Will you consider it an act of devotion?” he asked. There was so little of devotion, and so much more of mischief in his eyes, that Miss Langham guessed he was only laughing at her, and shook her head. “You won’t go,” she said, turning away. She followed him with her eyes, however, as he crossed the room, his head and shoulders towering above the native men and women. She had never seen him so resplendent, and she noted, with an eye that considered trifles, the orders, and his well-fitting white gloves, and his manner of bowing in the Continental fashion, holding his opera- hat on his thigh, as though his hand rested on a sword. She noticed that the little Olanchoans stopped and looked after him, as he pushed his way among them, and she could see that the men were telling the women who he was. Sir Julian Pindar, the old British Minister, stopped him, and she watched them as they laughed together over the English war medals on the American’s breast, which Sir Julian touched with his finger. He called the French Minister and his pretty wife to look, too, and they all laughed and talked together in great spirits, and Miss Langham wondered if Clay was speaking in French to them. Miss Langham did not enjoy the ball; she felt injured and aggrieved, and she assured herself that she had been hardly used. She had only done her duty, and yet all the sympathy had gone to her sister, who had placed her in a trying position. She thought it was most inconsiderate. Hope walked slowly across the veranda when the others had gone, and watched the carriage as long as it remained in sight. Then she threw herself into a big arm-chair, and looked down upon her pretty frock and her new dancing-slippers. She, too, felt badly used. The moonlight fell all about her, as it had on the first night of their arrival, a month before, but now it seemed cold and cheerless, and gave an added sense of loneliness to the silent house. She did not go inside to read, as she had promised to do, but sat for the next hour looking out across the harbor. She could not blame Alice. She considered that Alice always moved by rules and precedents, like a queen in a game of chess, and she wondered why. It made life so tame and uninteresting, and yet people invariably admired Alice, and some one had spoken of her as the noblest example of the modern gentlewoman. She was sure she could not grow up to be any thing like that. She was quite confident that she was going to disappoint her family. She wondered if people would like her better if she were discreet like Alice, and less like her brother Ted. If Mr. Clay, for instance, would like her better? She wondered if he disapproved of her riding on the engine with MacWilliams, and of her tearing through the mines on her pony, and spearing with a lance of sugar-cane at the mongrel curs that ran to snap at his flanks. She remembered his look of astonished amusement the day he had caught her in this impromptu pig-sticking, and she felt herself growing red at the recollection. She was sure he thought her a tomboy. Probably he never thought of her at all. Hope leaned back in the chair and looked up at the stars above the mountains and tried to think of any of her heroes and princes in fiction who had gone through such interesting experiences as had Mr. Clay. Some of them had done so, but they were creatures in a book and this hero was alive, and she knew him, and had probably made him despise her as a silly little girl who was scolded and sent off to bed like a disobedient child. Hope felt a choking in her throat and something like a tear creep to her eyes: but she was surprised to find that the fact did not make her ashamed of herself. She owned that she was wounded and disappointed, and to make it harder she could not help picturing Alice and Clay laughing and talking together in some corner away from the ball-room, while she, who understood him so well, and who could not find the words to tell him how much she valued what he was and what he had done, was forgotten and sitting here alone, like Cinderella, by the empty fireplace. The picture was so pathetic as Hope drew it, that for a moment she felt almost a touch of self-pity, but the next she laughed scornfully at her own foolishness, and rising with an impatient shrug, walked away in the direction of her room.