"What's wrong?" asked Carroll.

"Says he won't go there. Says he was hired by you for shopping."

Carroll took one look at the agony-wrung face of the beggar, who was being held on the seat by his companion.

"Won't he?" said he grimly. "We'll see."

Rising, he threw a pair of long arms around those of the driver, pinning him, caught the reins, and turned the horses.

"Now ask him if he'll drive," he directed Perkins.

"Si, senor!" gasped the coachman, whose breath had been squeezed almost through his crackling ribs.

"See that you do," the Southerner bade him, in accents that needed no interpretation.

Presently Perkins looked up from his charge.

"Got a cigar?" he asked abruptly.

"No," replied the other, a little disgusted by this levity in the presence of imminent death.

Perkins bade the driver stop at the corner.

"Don't let him fall off the seat," he admonished Carroll, and jumped out.

In the course of a minute he reappeared, smoking a cheroot that appeared to be writhing and twisting in the effort to escape from its own noxious fumes.

"Have one," he said, extending a handful to his companion.

"I don't care for it," returned the other superciliously. While willing to aid in a good work, he did not in the least approve either of the Unspeakable Perk or of his offhand manners.

Before they had gone much farther, his resentment was heated to the point of offense.

"Is it necessary for you to puff every puff of that infernal smoke in my face?" he demanded ominously.

"Well, you wouldn't smoke, yourself."

"If it weren't for this poor devil of a sick man—" began Carroll, when a second thought about the smoke diverted his line of thought. "Is it contagious?" he asked.

"It's so regarded," observed the other dryly.

"I'll take one of those, thank you."

Perkins handed him one of the rejected spirals. In silence, except for the outrageous rattling of the wheels on the cobbles, they drove through mean streets that grew ever meaner, until they drew up at the blind front of a building abutting on an arroyo of the foothills. Here they stopped, and Carroll threw his jehu a five- bolivar piece, which the driver caught, driving away at once, without the demand for more which usually follows overpayment in Caracuna. Convenient to hand lay a small rock. Perkins used it for a knocker, hammering on the guarded wooden door with such vehemence as to still the clamor that arose from within.

Through the opening, as the barrier was removed by a leather- skinned old crone, Carroll gazed into a passageway, beyond which stretched a foul mule yard, bordered by what the visitor at first supposed to be stalls, until he saw bedding and utensils in them. The two men lifted the cripple in, amid the outcries and lamentations of the aged woman, who had looked at his face and then covered her own. At once they were surrounded by a swarm of women and children, who pressed upon them, hampering their movements, until a shrill voice cried:—

"La muerte negra!"

The swarm fell into silence, scattered, vanished, leaving only the moaning woman to help. At her direction they settled the patient on a straw pallet in a side room.

"That's all you can do," said the Unspeakable Perk to his companion. "And thank you."

"I'll stay."

The goggles gloomed upon him in the dim room.

"I thought probably you would," commented Perkins, and busied himself over the cripple with a knife and some cloths. He had stuffed his ludicrous white gloves into his pocket, and was tearing strips from his handkerchief with skillful fingers.

"Oughtn't he to have a doctor?" asked Carroll. "Shall I go for one?"

"His mother has sent. No use, though."

"He can't be saved?"

"Not a chance on earth. I should say he was in the last stages."

"What is it?" said Carroll hesitantly.

"La muerte negra. The black death."

"Plague?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure? Are you an expert?"

"One doesn't have to be to recognize a case like that. The lump in the armpit is as big as a pigeon's egg."

"Why have you interested yourself in the man to such an extent?" asked Carroll curiously.

"He's a friend of mine. Why did you?"

"Oh, that's quite different. One can't disregard a call for help such as yours."

"A certain kind of 'one' can't," returned the Unspeakable Perk, with his half-smile. "You don't mind my saying, Mr. Carroll, you're a brave man."

"And I'd have said that you weren't," replied the other bluntly. "I give it up. But I know this: I'm going to be pretty wretchedly frightened until I know that I haven't got it. I'm frightened now."

"Then you're a braver man than I thought. But the danger may be less than you think. Stick to that cigar—here are two more—and wait for me outside. Here's the doctor."

Profound and solemn under a silk hat, the local physician entered, bowing to Carroll as they passed in the hallway. Almost immediately Perkins emerged. On his face was a sardonic grin.

"Malaria," he observed. "The learned professor assures me that it's a typical malaria."

"Then it isn't the plague," said Carroll, relieved.

His relief was of brief duration.

"Of course it's plague. But if Professor Silk Hat, in there, officially declared it such, he'd have bracelets on his arms in twelve hours. The present Government of Caracuia doesn't believe in bubonic plague. I fancy our unfortunate friend in there will presently disappear, either just before or just after death. It doesn't greatly matter."

"What is to be done now?" asked Carroll.

"See that brush fire up there?" The hermit pointed to the hillside. "If we steep ourselves in that smoke until we choke, I think it will discourage any fleas that may have harbored on us. The flea is the only agent of communication."

Soot-begrimed, strangling, and with streaming eyes, they emerged, five minutes later, from the cloud of smoke. From his pocket the Unspeakable Perk dragged forth his white gloves. The action attracted his companion's attention.

"Good Lord!" he cried. "What has happened to your hands?"

"They're blistered."

"Stripped, rather. They look as if you'd fallen into a fire, or rowed a fifty-mile race. That message of Mr. Brewster's—See here, Perkins, you didn't row that over to the mainland? No, you couldn't. That's absurd. It's too far."

"No; I didn't row it to the mainland."

"But you've been rowing. I'd swear to those hands. Where? The blockading Dutch warship?"

The other nodded.

"Last night. Yah-h-h!" he yawned. "It makes me sleepy to think of it."

"Why didn't they blow you out of the water?" "Oh, I was semiofficially expected. Message from our consul. They transferred the message by wireless. I'm telling you all this, Mr. Carroll, because I think you'll get your release within forty-eight hours, and I want you to see that some of your party keeps constantly in touch with Mr. Sherwen. It's mighty important that your party should get out before plague is officially declared."

"Are you going to report this case?"

"All that I know about it."

"But, of course, you can't report officially, not being a physician," mused the other. "Still, when Dr. Pruyn comes, it will be evidence for him, won't it?"

"Undoubtedly. I should consider any delay after twenty-four hours risky for your party."

"What shall you do? Stay?"

"Oh, I've my place in the mountains. That's remote enough to be safe. Thank Heaven, there's a cloud over the sun! Let's sit down by this tree for a minute."

Unthinkingly, as he stretched himself out, the Unspeakable Perk pushed his goggles back and presently slipped them off. Thus, when Carroll, who had been gazing at the mist-capped peak of the mountain in front, turned and met his companion's eyes, he underwent something of the same shock that Polly Brewster had experienced, though the nature of his sensation was profoundly different. But his impression of the suddenly revealed face was the same. Ribbed-in though his mind was with tradition, and distorted with falsely focused ideals and prejudices, Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll possessed a sound underlying judgment of his fellow man, and was at bottom a frank and honorable gentleman. In his belief, the suddenly revealed face of the man beside him came near to being its own guaranty of honor and good faith.

"By Heavens, I don't believe it!" he blurted out, his gaze direct upon the Unspeakable Perk.

"What don't you believe?"

"That rotten club gossip."

"About me?"

"Yes," said Carroll, reddening.

The hermit pushed his glasses down, settled into place the white gloves, with their soothing contents of emollient greases, and got to his feet.

"We'd best be moving. I've got much to do," he said.

"Not yet," retorted Carroll. "Perkins, is there a woman up there on the mountains with you?"

"That is purely my own business."

"You told Miss Brewster there wasn't. If you tell me—"

"I never told her any such thing. She misunderstood."

"Who is the woman?"

"If you want it even more frankly, that is none of your concern."

"You have been letting Miss Brewster—"

"Are you engaged to marry Miss Brewster?"

"No."

"Then you have no authority to question me. But," he added wearily, "if it will ease your mind, and because of what you've done to-day, I 'll tell you this—that I do not expect ever to see Miss Brewster again."

"That isn't enough," insisted Carroll, his face darkening. "Her name has already been connected with yours, and I intend to follow this through. I am going to find out who the woman is at your place."

"How do you propose to do it?"

"By coming to see."

"You'll be welcome," said the other grimly. "By the way, here's a map." He made a quick sketch on the back of an envelope. "I'll be there at work most of to-morrow. Au revoir." He rose and started down the hill. "Better keep to yourself this evening," he warned. "Take a dilute carbolic bath. You'll be all right, I think."

Slowly and thoughtfully the Southerner made his way back to the hotel. After dining in his own room, he found time heavy on his hands; so, dispatching a note of excuse to Miss Brewster on the plea of personal business, he slipped out into the city. Wandering idly toward the hills, he presently found himself in a familiar street, and, impelled by human curiosity, proceeded to turn up the hill and stop opposite the blank door.

Here he was puzzled. To go in and inquire, even if he cared to and could make himself understood, would perhaps involve further risk of infection. While he was considering, the door slowly opened, and the leather-skinned crone appeared. Her eyes were swollen. In her hand she carried a travesty of a wreath, done in whitish metal, which she had interwoven with her own black mantilla, the best substitute for crape at hand. This she undertook to hang on the door. As Carroll crossed to address her, a powerful, sullen- faced man, with a scarred forehead and the insignia of some official status, apparently civic, on his coat, emerged from a doorway and addressed her harshly. She raised her reddened eyes to him and seemed to be pleading for permission to set up the little tribute to her dead. There was the exchange of a few more words. Then, with an angry exclamation, the official snatched the wreath from her. Carroll's hand fell on his shoulder. The man swung and saw a stranger of barely half his bulk, who addressed him in what seemed to be politely remonstrant tones. He shook himself loose and threw the wreath in the crone's face. Then he went down like a log under the impact of a swinging blow behind the ear. With a roar he leaped up and rushed. The foreigner met him with right and left, and this time he lay still.

Hanging the tragically unsightly wreath on the door, through which the terrified mourner had vanished, Carroll returned to the Gran Hotel Kast, his perturbed and confused thoughts and emotions notably relieved by that one comforting moment of action.



X

THE FOLLY OF PERK

Of the comprehensive superiority of the American Legation over the Gran Hotel Kast there could be no shadow of a doubt. From the moment of their arrival at noon of the day after the British Minister's warning, the refugees found themselves comfortable and content, Miss Brewster having quietly and tactfully taken over the management of internal affairs and reigning, at Sherwen's request, as generalissima. No disturbance had marked the transfer to their new abode. In fact, so wholly lacking was any evidence of hostility to the foreigners on the part of the crowds on the streets that the Brewsters rather felt themselves to be extorting hospitality on false pretenses. Sherwen, however, exhibited signal relief upon seeing them safely housed.

"Please stay that way, too," he requested.

"But it seems so unnecessary, and I want to market," protested Miss Polly.

"By no means! The market is the last place where any of us should be seen. It is in that section that Urgante has been doing his work."

"Who is he?"

"A wandering demagogue and cheap politician. Abuse of the 'Yankis' is his stock in trade. Somebody has been furnishing him money lately. That's the sole fuel to his fires of oratory."

"Bet the bills smelled of sauerkraut when they reached him," grunted Cluff, striding over to the window of the drawing-room, where the informal conference was being held.

"They may have had a Hochwaldian origin," admitted Sherwen. "But it would be difficult to prove."

"At least the Hochwald Legation wouldn't shed any tears over a demonstration against us," said Carroll.

"Well within the limits of diplomatic truth," smiled the American official.

"Pooh!" Mr. Brewster puffed the whole matter out of consideration. "I don't believe a word of it. Some of my acquaintances at the club, men in high governmental positions, assure me that there is no anti-American feeling here."

"Very likely they do. Frankness and plain-speaking being, as you doubtless know, the distinguishing mark of the Caracunan statesman."

The sarcasm was not lost upon Mr. Brewster, but it failed to shake his skepticism.

"There are some business matters that require that I should go to the office of the Ferro carril del Norte this afternoon," he said.

"I beg that you do nothing of the sort," cried Sherwen sharply.

The magnate hesitated. He glanced out of the window and along the street, close bounded by blank-walled houses, each with its eyes closed against the sun. A solitary figure strode rapidly across it.

"There's that bug-hunting fellow again," said Mr. Brewster. "He's an American, I guess,—God save the mark! Nobody seems to be interfering with HIM, and he's freaky enough looking to start a riot on Broadway."

Further comment was checked by the voice of the scientist at the door, asking to see Mr. Sherwen at once. Miss Polly immediately slipped out of the room to the patio, followed by Carroll and Cluff.

"My business, probably," remarked Mr. Brewster. "I'll just stay and see." And he stayed.

So far as the newcomer was concerned, however, he might as well not have been there; so he felt, with unwonted injury. The scientist, disregarding him wholly, shook hands with Sherwen.

"Have you heard from Wisner yet?"

"Yes. An hour ago."

"What was his message?"

"All right, any time to-day."

"Good! Better get them down to-night, then, so they can start to- morrow morning."

"Will Stark pass them?"

"Under restrictions. That's all been seen to."

At this point it appeared to Mr. Brewster that he had figured as a cipher quite long enough.

"Am I right in assuming that you are talking of my party's departure?" he inquired.

"Yes," said Sherwen. "The Dutch will let you through the blockade."

"Then my cablegram reached the proper parties at Washington," said the magnate, with an I-knew-it-would-be-that-way air.

"Thanks to Mr. Perkins."

"Of course, of course. That will be—er—suitably attended to later."

The Unspeakable Perk turned and regarded him fixedly; but, owing to the goggles, the expression was indeterminable.

"The fact is it would be more convenient for me to go day after to-morrow than to-morrow."

"Then you'd better rent a house," was the begoggled one's sharp and brief advice.

"Why so?" queried the great man, startled.

"Because if you don't get out to-morrow, you may not get out for months."

"As I understand the Dutch permit, it specifies AFTER to-day."

"It isn't a question of the Dutch. Caracuna City goes under quarantine to-night, and Puerto del Norte to-morrow, as soon as proper official notification can be given."

"Then plague has actually been found?"

"Determined by bacteriological test this morning."

"How do you know?"

"I was present at the finding."

"Who did it? Dr. Pruyn?"

The other nodded.

Sherwen whistled.

"Better make ready to move, Mr. Brewster," he advised. "You can't get out of port after quarantine is on. At least, you couldn't get into any other port, even if you sailed, because your sailing- master wouldn't have clearance papers."

The magnate smiled.

"I hardly think that any United States Consul, with a due regard for his future, would refuse papers to the yacht Polly," he observed.

"Don't be a fool!"

Thatcher Brewster all but jumped from his chair. That this adjuration should have come from the freakish spectacle-wearer seemed impossible. Yet Sherwen, the only other person in the room, was certainly not guilty.

"Did you address me, young man?"

"I did."

"Do you know, sir, that since boyhood no person has dared or would dare to call me a fool?"

"Well, I don't want to set a fashion," said the other equably. "I'm only advising you not to be."

"Keep your advice until it's wanted."

"If it were a question of you alone, I would. But there are others to be considered. Now, listen, Mr. Brewster: Wisner and Stark wouldn't let you through that quarantine, after it's declared, if you were the Secretary himself. A point is being stretched in giving you this chance. If you'll agree to ship a doctor,—Stark will find you one,—stay out for six full days before touching anywhere, and, if plague develops, make at once for any detention station specified by the doctor, you can go. Those are Stark's conditions."

"Damnable nonsense!" declared Mr. Brewster, jumping to his feet, quite red in the face.

"Let me warn you, Mr. Brewster," put in Sherwen, with quiet force, "that you are taking a most unwise course. I am advised that Mr. Perkins is acting under instructions from our consulate."

"You say that Dr. Pruyn is here. I want to see him before—"

"How can you see him? Nobody knows where he is keeping himself. I haven't seen him yet myself. Now, Mr. Brewster, just sit down and talk this over reasonably with Mr. Perkins."

"Oh, no," said the third conferee positively; "I've no time for argument. At six o'clock I 'll be back here. Unless you decide by then, I'll telephone the consulate that the whole thing is off."

"Of all the impudent, conceited, self-important young whippersnappers!" fumed Mr. Brewster. But he found that he had no audience, as Sherwen had followed the scientist out of the room.

Before the afternoon was over, the American concessionnaire had come to realize that the situation was less assured than he had thought. Twice the British Minister had come, and there had been calls from the representatives of several other nationalities. Von Plaanden, in full uniform and girt with the short saber that is the special and privileged arm of the crack cavalry regiment to which he belonged at home, had dismounted to deliver personally a huge bouquet for Miss Brewster, from the garden of the Hochwald Legation, not even asking to see the girl, but merely leaving the flowers as a further expression of his almost daily apology, and riding on to an official review at the military park.

He had spoken vaguely to Sherwen of a restless condition of the local mind. Reports, it appeared, had been set afloat among the populace to the effect that an American sanitary officer had been bribed by the enemies of Caracuna to declare plague prevalent, in order to close the ports and strangle commerce. Urgante was going about the lower part of the city haranguing on street corners without interference from the police. In the arroyo of the slaughter-house, two American employees of the street-car company had been stoned and beaten. Much aguardiente was in process of consumption, it being a half-holiday in honor of some saint, and nobody knew what trouble might break out.

"Bolas are rolling around like balls on a billiard table," said young Raimonda, who had come after luncheon to call on Miss Brewster. "In this part of the city there will be nothing. You needn't be alarmed."

"I'm not afraid," said Miss Polly.

"I'm sure of it," declared the Caracunan, with admiration. "You are very wonderful, you American women."

"Oh, no. It's only that we love excitement," she laughed.

"Ah, that is all very well, for a bull-fight or 'la boxe.' But for one of our street emeutes—no; too much!"

They were seated on the roof of the half-story of the house, which had been made into a trellised porch overlooking the patio in the rear and the street in front, an architectural wonder in that city of dead walls flush with the sidewalk line all the way up. Leaning over the rail, the visitor pointed through the leaves of a small gallito tree to a broad-fronted building almost opposite.

"That is my club. You have other friends there who would do anything for you, as I would, so gladly," he added wistfully. "Will you honor me by accepting this little whistle? It is my hunting-whistle. And if there should be anything—but I think there will not—you will blow it, and there will be plenty to answer. If not, you will keep it, please, to remember one who will not forget you."

Handsome and elegant and courtly he was, a true chevalier of adventurous pioneering stock, sprung from the old proud Spanish blood, but there stole behind the girl's vision, as she bade him farewell, the undesired phantasm of a very different face, weary and lined and lighted by steadfast gray eyes—eyes that looked truthful and belonged to a liar! Miss Polly Brewster resumed her final packing in a fume of rage at herself.

All hands among the visitors passed the afternoon dully. Mr. Brewster, who had finally yielded to persuasion and decided not to venture out, though still deriding the restriction as the merest nonsense, was in a mood of restless silence, which his irrepressible daughter described to Fitzhugh Carroll as "the superior sulks."

Carroll himself kept pretty much aloof. He had the air of a man who wrestles with a problem. Cluff fussed and fretted and privately cursed the country and all its concessions. Between calls and the telephone, Sherwen was kept constantly busy. But a few minutes before six, central, in the blandest Spanish, regretted to inform him that Puerto del Norte was cut off. When would service be resumed? Quien sabe? It was an order. Hasta manana. To-morrow, perhaps. Smoothing a furrow from his brow, the sight of which would have done nobody any good, he suggested that they all gather on the roof porch for a swizzle. The suggestion was hailed with enthusiasm.

Thus, when the Unspeakable Perk came hustling down the street some minutes earlier than the appointed time, he was hailed in Sherwen's voice, and bidden to come directly up. No time, on this occasion, for Miss Polly to escape. She decided in one breath to ignore the man entirely; in the next to bow coldly and walk out; in the next to—He was there before the latest wavering decision could be formulated.

"Better all get inside," he said a little breathlessly. "There may be trouble."

Cluff brightened perceptibly.

"What kind of trouble?"

"Urgante is leading a mob up this way. They're turning the corner now."

"I'm going to wait and see them," cried Miss Polly, with decision.

"Bend over, then, all of you," ordered Sherwen. "The vines will cover you if you keep down."

Around the corner, up the hill from where they were, streamed a rabble of boys, leaping and whooping, and after them a more compact crowd of men, shoeless, centering on a tall, broad, heavy- mustached fellow who bore on a short staff the Stars and Stripes.

"Where on earth did he get that?" cried Sherwen.

"Looted the Bazaar Americana," replied Perkins.

"That's Urgante," growled Cluff; "that devil with the flag."

"But he seems to be eulogizing it," cried the girl.

The orator had set down his bright burden, wedging it in the iron guard railing of a tree, and was now apostrophizing it with extravagant bows and honeyed accents in which there was an undertone of hiss. For confirmation, Miss Polly turned to the others. The first face her eyes fell on was that of the ball- player. Every muscle in it was drawn, and from the tightened lips streamed such whispered curses as the girl never before had heard. Next him stood the hermit, solid and still, but with a queer spreading pallor under his tan. In front of them Sherwen was crouched, scowlingly alert. The expression of Mr. Brewster and Carroll, neither of whom understood Spanish, betokened watchful puzzlement.

Enlightenment burst upon them the next minute. From the motley crowd below rose a snarl of laughter and savage jeering, the object of which was unmistakable.

"By G—d!" cried Mr. Brewster, straightening up and grasping the railing. "They're insulting the flag!"

"I've left my pistol!" muttered Carroll, white-lipped. "I've left my pistol!"

Polly Brewster's hand flew to her belt.

She drew out the automatic and held it toward the Southerner. But it was not Carroll's hand that met hers; it was the Unspeakable Perk's.

"No," said he, and he flung the weapon back of him into the patio.

"Oh! Oh!" cried the girl. "You unspeakable coward!"

Carroll jumped forward, but Sherwen was equally quick. He interposed his slight frame.

"Perkins is right," he said decisively. "No shooting. It would be worth the life of every one here. We've got to stand it. But somebody is going to sweat blood for this day's work!"

The instinct of discipline, characteristic of the professional athlete, brought Cluff to his support.

"What Mr. Sherwen says, goes," he said, almost choking on the words. "We've got to stand it."

In the breast of Miss Polly Brewster was no response to this spirit. She was lawless with the lawlessness of unconquered youth and beauty.

"Oh!" she breathed "If I had my pistol back, I'd shoot that BEAST myself!"

The scientist turned his goggles hesitantly upon her.

"Miss Brewster," he began, "please don't think—"

"Don't speak to me!" she cried.

Another clamor of derision sounded from the street as Urgante resumed the standard of his mockery and led his rabble forward. Behind the dull-colored mass appeared a spot of splendor. It was Von Plaanden, gorgeous in his full regalia, who had turned the corner, returning from the public reception. Well back of the mob, he pulled his horse up, and sat watching. The coincidence was unfortunate. It seemed to justify Sherwen's bitter words:—

"Come to visa his work. There's the Hochwaldian for you!"

Forward danced and reeled the "Yanki" baiters below, until they were under the balcony where the little group of Americans sheltered and raged silently. There the orator again spewed forth his contempt upon the alien banner, and again the ranks behind him shrieked their approval of the affront. Miss Polly Brewster, American of Americans, whose great-grandfathers had fought with Herkimer and Steuben,—themselves the sons of women who had stood by the loopholes of log houses and caught up the rifles of their fallen pioneer husbands, wherewith to return the fire of the besieging Mohawks,—ran forward to the railing, snatching her skirt from the detaining grasp of her father. In the corner stood a huge bowl of roses. Gathering both hands full, she leaned forward and flung them, so that they fell in a shower of loveliness upon the insulted flag of her nation.

For an instant silence fell upon the "great unwashed" below. Out of it swelled a muttering as the leader made a low, mocking obeisance to the girl, following it with a word that brought a jubilant yelp from his adherents. Stooping, he ladled up in his cupped hand a quantity of gutter filth. Where the flowers had but a moment before fluttered in the folds, he splotched it, smearing star, bar, and blue with its blackness. At the sight, the girl burst into helpless tears, and so stood weeping, openly, bitterly, and unashamed.

No brain is so well ordered, no emotion so thoroughly controlled, but that under sudden pressure—click!—the mechanism slips a cog and runs amuck. Just that thing happened inside the Unspeakable Perk's smooth-running, scientific brain upon incitement of his flag's desecration and his lady's grief. To her it seemed that he shot past her horizontally like a human dart. The next second he was over the railing, had swung from a branch of the neighboring tree to the trunk, and leaped to the ground, all in one movement of superhuman agility. To the mob his exploit was apparently without immediate significance. Perhaps they didn't notice the descent; or perhaps those few who saw were so astonished at the apparition of a chunky tree-man with protuberant eyes scrambling down upon them in the manner of an ape, that they failed to appreciate what it might portend of trouble.

The hermit landed solidly on his feet a few yards from Urgante, the flag bearer. With a berserker yell, he rushed. Taken by surprise, the assailed one still had time to lift the heavy staff. As quickly, the American lowered his head and dove. It may not have been magnificent; it certainly was not war by the rules; but it was eminently effective. To say that the leader went down would be absurdly inadequate. He simply crumpled. Over and over he rolled on the cobbles, while the smirched flag flew clear of his grasp, and fell on the farther sidewalk.

"Wow!" yelled Cluff, leaping into the air. "Football! That cost him a couple of ribs. Hey, Rube!"

And he rushed for the stairs, followed by Carroll, Sherwen, and, only one jump behind, Mr. Thatcher Brewster, cursing in a manner that did credit to his patriotism, but would have added no luster to his record as an elder of the Pioneer Presbyterian Church, of Utica, New York.

Meantime, the Unspeakable Perk, having rolled free of the fallen enemy, staggered to his feet and caught up the flag. Stunned surprise on the part of the crowd gave him an instant's time. He edged along the curb, hoping to gain the legation door by a rush. But the foe threw out a wing, cutting him off. Several eager followers had lifted Urgante, whose groans and curses suggested a sound basis for Cluff's diagnosis. Himself quite hors de combat, he spat at the Unspeakable Perk, and cried upon his henchmen to kill the "Yanki." It seemed not improbable to the latter that they would do it. Perkins set his back to the wall, twirled the flag folds tight around the pole, reversed and clubbed the staff, and prepared to make any attempt at killing as uncomfortable and unprofitable as possible. The rabble, by no means favorably impressed by these businesslike proceedings, stood back, growling.

A hand flew up above the crowd. The Unspeakable Perk ducked sharply and just in time, as a knife struck the wall above him and clattered to the pavement. Instantly he caught it up, but the blade had snapped off short. As he stooped, one bold spirit rushed in. Perkins met him with a straight lance-thrust of the staff, which sent him reeling and shrieking with pain back to his fellows. But now another knife, and another, struck and fell from the wall at his back; badly aimed both, but presumably the forerunners of missiles, some of which would show better marksmanship. The assailed man cast a swift, desperate look about him; the crowd closed in a little. Obviously he must keep "eyes front."

"To your left! To your left!" The voice came to him clear and sweet above the swelling growl of the rabble. "The doorway! Get into the doorway, Mr. Beetle Man."

A few paces away, how far Perkins could only guess, was the entrance to the house. He surmised that, like many of the better- class houses, it had a small set-in door, at right angles to the main entrance, that would serve as a shallow shelter. Without raising his eyes, he nodded comprehension, and began to edge along the wall, swinging his stout weapon. As he went, he wondered what was keeping the others. At that moment the others were frantically wrestling with the all-too-adequate bars with which Sherwen had reinforced the wide door.

Perkins, feeling with a cautious heel, found himself opposite the entry indicated by the voice. Turning, he darted into the narrow embrasure. Here he was comparatively safe from the missiles that were now coming from all directions. On the other hand, he now lacked room to swing his formidable club. The peons, with a shout, closed in to arm's length. Alone on her balcony, the girl turned her head away and cried aloud, hopelessly, for help. She wanted to close her ears against the bestial shouts of a mob trampling to death a defenseless man, but her arms were of lead. She listened and shivered.

Instead of the sound that she dreaded there came the ringing of hoofs on stones, followed by yells of alarm. She opened her eyes to see Von Plaanden, bent forward in his saddle at the exact angle proper to the charge, urging his great horse down upon the mass of people as ruthlessly as if they had been so many insects. Through the circle he broke, swinging his mount around beside the shallow doorway before which three Caracunans already lay sprawled, attesting the vigor of the defender's final resistance. Back of the horseman lay half a dozen other figures. The Hochwaldian jerked out his sword and stood, a splendid spectacle. Very possibly he was not wholly unmindful of his own pictorial quality or of the lovely American witness thereto.

His intervention gave a few seconds' respite, one of those checks that save battles and make history. Now, in the further making of this particular history, sounded a lusty whoop from the opposite direction; such a battle slogan as only the Anglo-Saxon gives. It emanated from Galpy the bounder, bounding now, indeed, at full speed up the slope, followed by two of his fellow railroad men, flannel-clad and still perspiring from their afternoon's cricket. Against bare legs a cricket bat is a highly dissuasive argument. The Britons swung low and hard for the ancient right of the breed to break into a row wherever white men are in the minority against other races. The downhill wing of the mob being much the weakest, opened up for them with little resistance, leaving them a free path to the cavalryman, to whose side Perkins, with staff ready brandished, had advanced from his shelter.

"Wot's the merry game?" inquired the cockney cheerfully.

Before them the crowd swayed and parted, and there appeared, lifted by many arms, a figure with a dead-white face streaked with blood, running from a great gash in the scalp.

"He went down in front of my horse," explained the Hochwald secretary coolly.

At the sight, there rose from the crowd a wailing cry, quite different from its former voice. Galpy's teeth set and his cricket bat went up in the air.

"There'll be killing for this," he said. "I know these blightehs. That yell means blood. We must make a bolt for it. Is this all there is of us?"

At the moment of his asking, it was. One half a second later, it wasn't, as the last of the legation's stubborn bars yielded, the door burst open, and the four Americans tumbled out at the charge, Cluff yelling insanely, Carroll in deadly quiet, Sherwen alertly scanning the adversaries for identifiable faces, and Elder Brewster still imperiling his soul by the fervor of his language. Each was armed with such casual weapons as he had been able to catch up. Carroll, a leap in advance of the rest, encountered an Indian drover, half-dodged a swinging blow from his whip, and sent him down with a broken shoulder from a chop with a baseball club that he had found in the hallway. A bull-like charge had carried Cluff deep among the Caracunans, where he encountered a huge peon. whom he seized and flung bodily over the iron guard of a samon tree, where the man hung, yelling dismally. Two other peons, who had seized the athlete around the knees, were all but brained by a stoneware gin bottle in the hands of Sherwen. Meanwhile, Mr. Brewster was performing prodigies with a niblick which he had extracted, at full run, from a bag opportunely resting against the hat-rack. Almost before they knew it, the rescue party had broken the intercepting wing of the mob, and had joined the others.

Cluff threw a gorilla-like arm across the Unspeakable Perk's shoulder,

"Hurt, boy?" he cried anxiously.

"No, I'm all right. Who's left with Miss Brewster?"

"Nobody. We must get back."

Sherwen's cool voice cut in:—

"Close together, now. Keep well up. Herr von Plaanden, will you cover us at the end?"

"It is the post of honor," said the Hochwaldian.

"You've earned it. But for you, they'd have got our colors."

The foreigner bowed, and swung his horse toward a Caracunan who had pressed forward a little too near. But, for the moment the fight had oozed out of the mob.

Without mishap the group got across the street, Perkins still clinging to the flag.

Suddenly, from the rear rank, came a shower of stones, followed by the final rush. Galpy and Perkins went down. Von Plaanden tottered in his saddle, but quickly recovered. Instantly Perkins was up again, the blood streaming from the side of his head. He was conscious of brown hands clutching at the cricketer, to drag him away. He himself seized the cockney's legs and braced for that absurd and deadly tug of war. Then Von Plaanden's saber descended, and he was able to haul Galpy back into safety.

The situation was desperate now. Mr. Brewster was pinned against the wall and disarmed, but still fighting with fist and foot. Half a dozen peons were struggling with Cluff across the bodies of as many more whom he had knocked down. Sherwen, almost under the cavalryman's mount, was protecting his rear with the fallen Galpy's cricket bat, and the two other cricketers were fighting back to back on the other side. Carroll was clubbing his way toward Mr. Brewster, but his weapon was now in his left hand. Matters looked dark indeed, when there shrilled fiercely from above them the whirring peal of a silver whistle.

Polly Brewster had remembered Raimonda. It seemed a futile signal, for as she ran to the railing and gazed across at the Club Amicitia, she saw all its windows and doors tight closed, as befits an aristocratic club that has no concern with the affairs of the rabble. But there is no way of closing a patio from the top, and sounds can enter readily that way, when all other apertures are shut. Long and loud Miss Polly blew the signal on the silver hunting-whistle.

In the club patio, Raimonda was chafing and wondering, and a score of his friends were drinking and waiting. That signal released their activities and terminated the battle of the American Legation most ingloriously for the forces of Urgante. For the gilded youth of Caracuna bears a heavy cane of fashion, and carries a ready revolver, also, although not so admittedly as a matter of fashion. Furthermore, he has a profound contempt for the peon class; a contempt extending to life and limb. Therefore, when some two dozen young patricians sallied abruptly forth with their canes, and the mob caught sight, here and there, of a glint of nickel against the black, it gave back promptly. Some desultory stones rattled against the walls. There were answering reports a few, and sundry yells of pain. The army of Urgante broke and fled down the side streets, leaving behind its broken and its wounded. Most of the bullet casualties were below the knee. The Caracunan aristocrat always fires low—the first time.

Shortly thereafter, Miss Polly Brewster appeared upon the balcony of the American Legation, and performed an illegal act. Upon a day not designated as a Caracunan national holiday, she raised the flag of an alien nation and fixed it, and the gilded youth of Caracuna in the street below cheered, not the flag, which would have been unpatriotic, but the flag-raiser, which was but gallant, until they were hoarse and parched of throat.



XI

PRESTO CHANGE

After the battle, Miss Brewster reviewed her troops, and took stock of casualties, in the patio. None of the allied forces had come off scatheless. Galpy, whose injuries had at first seemed the most severe, responded to a stiff dose of brandy. A cut across the scientist's head had been hastily bandaged in a towel, giving him, as he observed, the appearance of a dissipated Hindu. To Von Plaanden's indignant disgust, his military splendor was seriously impaired by a huge "hickey" over his left eye, the memento of a well-aimed rock. Cluff had broken a finger and sprained his wrist. Mr. Brewster was anxious to know if any one had seen two teeth of his on the pavement or whether he was to look for later digestive indications of their whereabouts. Both of the young cricketers had been battered and bruised, though it was nothing, they gleefully averred, to what they had meted out. And Carroll had a nasty- looking knife-thrust in his shoulder.

All of them were disheveled, dilapidated, and grimy to the last degree, except the Hochwaldian, who still sat his horse, which he had ridden into the patio. But Miss Polly said to herself, with a thrill of pride, that no woman need wish a more gallant and devoted band of defenders. Leaning over them from the inner railing of the balcony, she surveyed them with sparkling eyes.

"It was magnificent!" she cried. "Oh, I'm so proud of you all! I could hug you, every one!"

"Better come down from there, Polly," said her father anxiously. "Some of those ruffians might come back."

"Not to-day," said Sherwen grimly. "They've had enough."

"That is correct," confirmed Von Plaanden. "Nevertheless, there may be disorder later. Would it not be better that you go to the British Legation, Fraulein?"

"Not I!" she returned. "I stay by my colors. And now I'm going to disband my army."

Stretching out her hand to a vase near her, she drew out a rose of deepest red and held it above Von Plaanden.

"The color of my country," said Von Plaanden gravely. "May I take it for a sign that I am forgiven?"

"Fully, freely, and gladly," said the girl. "You have put a debt upon us all that I—that we can never repay."

"It is I who pay. You will not think of me too hardly, for my one breach?"

"I shall think of you as a hero," said the girl impetuously. "And I shall never forget. Catch, O knight."

The rose fell, and was caught. Von Plaanden bowed low over it. Then he straightened to the military salute, and so rode out of the door and out of the girl's life.

"Men are strange creatures," mused the philosopher of twenty. "You think they are perfectly horrid, and suddenly they show their other side to you, and you think they are perfectly splendid. I wish I knew a little more about real people."

She confessed to no more specific thought, but as she descended the stairs to bid farewell to the blushing and deprecatory Britons, she was eager to have it over with, and to come to speech with her beetle man, who had so strangely flamed into action. The Unspeakable Perk! As the name formed on her lips, she smiled tenderly. With sad lack of logic, she was ready to discard every suspicion of him that she had harbored, merely on the strength of his reckless outbreak of patriotism. She looked about the patio, but he was not there. Sherwen came out of a side door, his face puckered with anxiety.

"Where is Mr. Perkins?" she asked.

"In there." He nodded back over his shoulder. "Your father is with him. Perhaps you'd better go in."

With a chill at her heart, Polly entered the room, where Mr. Brewster bent a troubled face over a head swathed in reddened bandages.

Very crumpled and limp looked the Unspeakable Perk, bunched humpily upon the little sofa. His goggles had fallen off, and lay on the floor beside him, contriving somehow to look momentously solemn and important all by themselves. His face was turned half away, and, as Polly's gaze fell upon it, she felt again that queer catch at her heart.

"Wouldn't know it was the same chap, would you?" whispered Mr. Brewster.

The girl picked up the grotesque spectacles, cradling them for an instant in her hands before she put them aside and leaned over the quiet form.

"Came staggering in, and just collapsed down there," continued her father huskily. "Lord, I wouldn't lose that boy after this for a million dollars!"

"Why do you talk that way?" she demanded sharply. "What has happened? Did he faint?"

"Just collapsed. When I tried to rouse him, he kicked me in the chest," replied the magnate, with somber seriousness.

"Oh, you goose of a dad!" There was a tremulous note in Polly's low laughter. "That's all right, then. Can't you see he's dead for sleep, poor beetle man?"

"Do you think so?" said Mr. Brewster, vastly relieved. "Hadn't I better go out for a doctor, and make sure?"

She shook her head.

"Let him rest. Hand me that pillow, please, dad."

With soft little pushes and wedges she worked it under the scientist's head. "What a dreadful botch of bandaging! He looks so pale! I wonder if I couldn't get those cloths off. Lend me your knife, dad."

Gently as she worked, the head on the pillow began to sway, and the lips to move.

"Oh, let me alone!" they muttered querulously.

The eyes opened. The Unspeakable Perk gazed up into the faces above him, but saw only one, a face whose tender concern softened it to a loveliness greater even than when he had last seen it. He tried to rise, but the hands that pressed him back were firm and quick.

"Lie still!" bade their owner.

A thin film of color mounted to his cheeks.

"I—I—beg your pardon," he stammered. "I—I—d-didn't know—"

"Don't be a goose!" she adjured him. "It's only me."

"Yes, that's the trouble." He closed his eyes again, and began to murmur.

"What does he say?" asked Mr. Brewster, lowering his head and almost falling over backward as his astonished ears were greeted by the slowly intoned rhythm:—

"Scarab, tarantula, doodle-bug, flea."

"Delirious!" exclaimed the magnate. "Clean off his head! How does one find a doctor in this town?"

"No need, dad," his daughter reassured him. "It's just a—a sort of game."

"Game! Did you hear what he said?"

"Well, a kind of password. It's all right, Dad. It is, really."

Still undecided, Mr. Brewster stared at the injured man.

"I don't know—" he began, when the eyes opened again.

"Feeling better?" inquired Polly briskly.

"Yes. The charm works perfectly."

"Anything I can do, or get, for you, my boy?" inquired Mr. Brewster, stepping forward.

"What's in the ice-box?" asked the other anxiously.

"Oh!" cried the girl in distress. "He's starving! When did you eat last?"

"I can't exactly remember. It was about five this morning, I think. A banana, and, as I recall it, a small one."

"Dad!" cried the girl, but that prompt and efficient gentleman was already halfway to the cook, dragging Sherwen along as interpreter.

"He'll get whatever there is in the shortest known time," the girl assured her patient. "Trust dad. Now, you lie back and let me fix up a fresh bandage."

"You'd have made a great trained nurse," he murmured, as she adjusted the clean strips that Sherwen had sent in. "Don't pin my ear down. It's got to help hold my goggles on."

"The dear funny goggles!" Picking them up, she patted them with dainty fingers, before setting them aside. He watched her uneasily, much in the manner of a dog whose bone has been taken away.

"Do you mind giving them back?" he said.

"But you're not going to wear them here," she protested.

"I've got so used to them," he explained apologetically, "that I don't feel really dressed without them."

She handed them back and he adjusted them to the bandages. "For the present, rest is prescribed you know," said she.

"Oh, no!" he declared. "As soon as I've had something to eat, I'll go. There are a hundred things to be done. Where are my gloves?"

"What gloves? Oh, those white abominations? Why on earth do you wear them?" Her glance fell upon his right hand, which lay half- open beside him. "Oh—oh—oh!" she cried in a rising scale of distress. "What have you done to your hands?"

He reddened perceptibly.

"Nothing."

"Nothing, indeed! Tell me at once!"

"I've been rowing."

"Where to?"

"Oh, out to a ship."

"There aren't any ships, except the Dutch warship. Was it to her?"

"Yes."

"To carry our message—MY message?"

He squirmed.

"I'm awfully sleepy," he protested. "It isn't fair to cross- examine a witness—"

"When was it?" his ruthless interrogator broke in.

"Night before last."

"How far?"

"How can I tell? Not far. A few miles."

"And back. And it took you all night," she accused.

"What if it did?" he cried peevishly. "A man's got to have some relief from work, hasn't he? It was livelier than sitting all night with one's eye glued to a microscope barrel!"

"Oh, beetle man, beetle man! I don't know about you at all. What kind of a strange queer creature are you? Have you wings, Mr. Beetle Man?"

Suddenly she bent over and laid her soft lips upon the scarified palm. The Unspeakable Perk sat up, with a half-cry.

"Now the other one," said the girl. Her face was a mantle of rose- color, but her eyes shone.

"I won't! You shan't!"

"The other one!" she commanded imperiously.

"Please, Miss Brewster—"

A noise at the door saved him. There stood Thatcher Brewster, magnate, multi-millionaire, and master of men, a huge tray in his hands.

"Beefsteak, fried potatoes, alligator pear, fresh bread, REAL butter, coffee, AND cake," he proclaimed jovially. "Not to mention a cocktail, which I compounded with my own skilled hands. Are you ready, my boy? Go!"

The Unspeakable Perk leaped from his couch.

"Food!" he cried. "Real American food! The perfume of it is a square meal."

"You're much gladder to see it than you were me," pouted Miss Polly.

"I'm not half as afraid of it," he admitted. "Mr. Brewster, your health."

"Here's to you, my boy. Now I'll leave you with your nurse, and make my final arrangements. We're off by special in the morning."

"That's fine!" said the scientist.

But Miss Polly Brewster caught the turn of his head in her direction, and saw that his fork had slackened in his hand. Something tightened around her heart.

As he went, her father considered her for a moment, and wondered. Never before had he seen such a look in her eyes as that which she had turned on the queer, vivid stranger so busily engaged at the tray. Polly, and this obscure scientist! After the kind of men whom the girl had known, enslaved, and eluded! Absurd! Yet if it were to be—Mr. Brewster reviewed the events of the afternoon— well, it might be worse.

"By the Lord Harry, he's a MAN, anyway!" decided Thatcher Brewster.

Meanwhile, the subject of his musings began to feel like a man once more, instead of like a lath. Having wrought havoc among the edibles, he rose with a sigh.

"If I could have one hour's sleep," he said mournfully, "I'd be fit as a cricket."

"You shall," said the girl. "Mr. Sherwen says he won't let you out of the house until it's dark. And that's fully an hour."

"I ought to be on my way back now."

"Back where? To your mountains?"

"Yes."

"You'd be recognized and attacked before you could get out of the city. I won't let you."

"That wouldn't do, for a fact. Perhaps it would be safer to wait. I've made enough trouble for one day by my blunder-headed thoughtlessness."

"Is that what you call rescuing the flag?"

"Oh, rescuing!" he said slightingly. "What difference does it make what vermin like that mob do? Just for a whim, to endanger all of you."

She stared at him in amaze and suspicion. But he was quite honest.

"MY whim," she reminded him.

"Yes; I suppose it was," he admitted thoughtfully. "When I saw you crying, I lost my head, and acted like a child."

"Then it was all my fault?"

"Oh, I don't say that. Certainly not. I'm master of my own actions. If I hadn't wanted—"

"But it was my fault this much, anyway, that you wouldn't have done it except for me."

"Yes; it was your fault to that extent," he said honestly. "I hope you don't mind my saying so."

"Oh, beetle man, beetle man!" She leaned forward, her eyes deep- lit pools of mirth and mockery and some more occult feeling that he could not interpret. "Would it scare you quite out of your poor, queer wits if I were to HUG you? Don't call for help. I'm not really going to do it."

"I know you're not," said he dolefully. "But about that row, I want to set myself right. I'm no fool. I know it took a certain amount of nerve to go down there. And I was even proud of it, in a way. And when Von Plaanden turned and gave me the salute before he went away, I liked it quite a good deal."

"Did he do that? I love him for it!" cried the girl.

"But my point is this, that what I did wasn't sound common sense. Now if Carroll had done it, it would have been all right."

"Why for him and not for you?"

"Because those are his principles. They're not mine."

"I wish you weren't quite so contemptuous of poor Fitz. It seems hardly fair."

"Contemptuous of him? I'd give half my life to be in his place after to-morrow."

"Why?" There was a flutter in her throat as she put the question.

"Because he's going with you, isn't he?"

"So are you, if you will."

"I can't."

"Father won't go without you, I believe. Won't you come, if I ask you?"

"No."

"Work, I suppose," said the girl; "the work that you love better than anything in the world."

"You're wrong there." His voice was not quite steady now. "But it's work that has to have my first consideration now. And there is one special responsibility that I can't evade, for the present, anyway."

"And afterward?" She dared not look at him as she spoke.

"Ah, afterward. There's too much 'perhaps' in the afterward down here. We science grubbers on the outposts enlist for the term of the war," he said, smiling wanly.

"How can I—can we go and leave you here?" she demanded obstinately.

"Oh, give me a square meal once in a while, and a night's rest here and there, and I'll do well enough."

"Oh, dear! I forgot your sleep. Here I've been chattering like a magpie. Take off your coat and lie down on that sofa at once."

"Where shall I find you when I wake up?"

"Right where you leave me when you fall asleep."

"Oh, no! You mustn't wear yourself out watching over me."

"Hush! You're under orders. Give me the coat." She hung it on the back of a chair. "Not another word now. And I'll call you when time is up."

He closed his eyes, and the girl sat studying his face in the dim light, graving it deep on her inner vision, seeking to formulate some conception of the strange being so still and placid before her. How had she ever thought him ridiculous and uncouth? How had she ever dared to insult him by distrust? What did it matter what other men, estimating him by their own sordid standards, said of him? As if her thought had established a connection with his, he opened his eyes and sat up.

"I knew there was something I wanted to ask you," he said. "What did your 'Never, never, never' mean?"

"A foolish misunderstanding that I'm ashamed of."

"Was it that—that woman-gossip business?"

"Yes. I was stupid. Will you forgive me?"

"What is there to forgive? Some time, perhaps, you'll understand the whole thing."

"Please don't let's say anything more about it. I do understand."

This was not quite true. All that Polly Brewster knew was that, with those clear gray eyes meeting hers, she would have believed his honor clean and high against the world. The presence of the woman, even that dress fluttering in the wind, was susceptible of a hundred simple explanations.

"Ah, that's all right, then." There was relief in his tone. "Of course, in a place like this there is a lot of gossip and criticism. And when one runs counter to the general law—" "Counter to the law?"

"Yes. As a rule, I'm not 'beyond the pale of law,'" he said, smiling. "But down here one isn't bound by the same conventions as at home."

The girl's hand went to her throat in a piteous gesture.

"I—I—don't understand. I don't want to understand."

"There's got to be a certain broad-mindedness in these matters," he blundered on, with what seemed to her outraged senses an abominable jauntiness. "But the risk was small for me, and, of course, for her, anything was better than the other life. At that, I don't see how the truth reached you. What is it, Miss Polly?"

Rage, grief, and shame choked the girl's utterance.

Without a word, she ran from the room, leaving her companion a prey to troubled wonder.

In the patio, she turned sharply to avoid a group gathered around Galpy, who, with a patch over one eye, was trying to impart some news between gasps.

"Got it from the bulletin board of La Liberdad," he cried. "Killed; body gone; devil to pay all over the place."

"What's that?" demanded the Unspeakable Perk, running out, coatless and goggleless.

"There's been another riot, and Dr. Luther Pruyn is killed," explained Sherwen.

"Who says so?"

"Bulletin board—La Liberdad—just saw it," panted Galpy.

"Nonsense! It's a bola"

"The whole city is ringing with it. They say it was a plot to get him out of the way to stop quarantine. The Foreign Office is buzzing with inquiries, and Puerto del Norte is burning up the wires."

"Puerto del Norte! How did they hear?"

"Telephone, of course. I hear Wisner is coming up," said Sherwen.

"I've got to get a wire to the port at once," cried the scientist. "At once!"

"You! What for?"

"To stop off Wisner. To tell him it isn't so."

"You're excited, my boy," said Mr. Brewster kindly. "Better lie down again."

"It's true, right enough," said the Englishman. "Sir Willet's cochero saw the mob get him."

"When? Where?" asked Fitzhugh Carroll.

"Haven't got any details, but the Government admits it."

"I don't care if the President and his whole cabinet swear to it," vociferated the Unspeakable Perk. "It's a fake. How can I get Puerto del Norte, Mr. Sherwen?"

"You can't get it at all for any such purpose. How do you know it's a fake?"

"How do I know? Oh, dammit! I'M Luther Pruyn!"

He snatched off his glasses and faced them.

The little group stood petrified. Mr. Brewster was first to recover.

"Crazy, poor chap!" he said. "Luther Pruyn was my classmate."

"That's my father, Luther L."

"Proofs," said Sherwen sharply.

"In my coat pocket. In the room. Can I have your wire, Mr. Sherwen?"

"It's cut."

"Come to the railway wire," offered Galpy. "My eye! Wot a game!"

The two men ran out, the scientist leaving behind coat and goggles.

"It was our little mix-up that started the rumor," said Carroll thoughtfully. "Somebody recognized Perk—Dr. Pruyn."

"When his glasses fell off," said CLuff. "They're some disguise."

"He's Luther Pruyn, sure enough!" said Mr. Sherwen, emerging from the room. "Here's the proof." He held out an official-looking document. "An order from the Dutch Naval Office, made out in his name."

"What does it say?" asked Carroll.

"I'm not much of a hand at Dutch, but it seems to direct the blockading warship to receive Dr. Luther Pruyn and wife and convey them to Curacao."

"And wife!" exclaimed Cluff loudly. He whistled as a vent to his amazement. "That explains all the talk about a woman—a lady in his quinta on the mountains?"

"Apparently," said Carroll. "May I see that document, Mr. Sherwen?"

The American representative handed him the paper. As he was studying it, Galpy reentered, still scant of breath from excitement and haste. "He's gone back to the mountains," he announced. "Sent word for you to get to the port before dawn, if you have to walk. See Mr. Wisner there. He'll arrange everything."

"Will Mr. Perk—Dr. Pruyn be there?" asked Mr. Brewster.

"He didn't say."

"But he's gone without his coat!"

"And goggles," said Cluff.

"And his pass," added Sherwen.

"Trust him to come back for them when he gets ready. He's a rum josser for doing things his own way. Now, about the train." And Galpy outlined the plan of departure to the men, who, except Carroll, had gathered about him. The Southerner, unnoticed, had slipped into the room where the scientist's coat lay. Coming out by the lower door, he was intercepted by Miss Polly Brewster. He interpreted the misery in her face, and turned sick at heart with the pain of what it told him.

"You heard?" he asked.

She nodded. "Is it true? Did you see the permit yourself?"

"Yes. Here it is."

"I don't want to see it. It doesn't matter," she said, with utter weariness in her voice. "When do we leave? I want to go home. Send father to me, please, Fitz."

Mr. Brewster came to her, bearing the news that the sailing was set for the morrow.

"I'm glad to know that Dr. and Mrs. Pruyn are provided for," she remarked, so casually that the troubled father drew a breath of relief, concluding that he must have misinterpreted the girl's interest in the man behind the goggles.

On his way to the patio, he passed through the room where the scientist had lain. He came out looking perturbed.

"Has any one been in that room just now?" he asked Sherwen.

"Not that I've seen."

"The coat and the other things are not there."

Inquiry and search alike proved unavailing. Not until an hour later did they discover that Carroll had also disappeared. Sherwen found a note from him on the office desk:—

Please look after my luggage. Will join the others at the yacht to-morrow.

P. F. F. C.



XII

THE WOMAN AT THE QUINTA

Thanks to his rival's map, Carroll had little difficulty in finding the trail to the mountain quinta. A brilliant new moon helped to make easy the ascent. What course he would pursue upon his arrival he had not clearly defined to himself. That would depend largely upon the attitude of the man he was seeking. The flame of battle, still hot from the afternoon's melee, burned high in the Southerner's soul, for he was not of those whose spirit rapidly cools. Bitter resentment on behalf of Miss Polly Brewster fanned that flame. On one point he was determined: neither he nor the so-called Perkins should leave the mountain until he had had from the latter's own lips a full explanation.

Coming out into the open space, he got his first glimpse of the quinta. It was dark, except for one low light. From the farther side there came faintly to his ear a rhythmical sound, with brief intervals of quiet, as if some one hard at labor were stopping from time to time for breath. At that distance, Carroll could not interpret the sound, but some unidentified quality of it struck chill upon his fancy. Long experience in the woods had made him a good trailsman. He proceeded cautiously until he reached the edge of the clearing.

The sound had stopped now, but he thought he could hear heavy breathing from beyond the house. As he moved toward that side, a small but malevolent-looking snake slithered out from beneath a bush near by. Involuntarily he leaped aside. As he landed, a round pebble slipped under his foot. He flung up his arm. It met the low branch of a tree, and saved him a fall. But the thrashing of the leaves made a startling noise in the moonlit stillness. The snake went on about its business.

"Hola!" challenged a voice around the angle of the house.

Carroll recognized the voice. He stepped out of the shadows and strode across the open space. At the corner of the house he met the muzzle of a revolver pointing straight at the pit of his stomach. Back of it were the steady and now goggleless eyes of Luther Pruyn.

"I am unarmed," said Carroll.

"Ah, it's you!" said the other. He lowered his weapon, carefully whirled the cylinder to bring the hammer opposite an empty chamber, and dropped it in his pocket. "What do you want?"

"An explanation."

"Quite so," said the other coolly. "I'd forgotten that I invited you here. How long had you been watching me?"

"I saw you only when you came out from behind the house."

"And you wish to know about—about my companion in this place?" continued the other in an odd tone.

"Yes."

"Understand that I don't admit that you have the smallest right. But to clear up a situation which no longer exists, I'm ready to satisfy you. Come in."

He held open the door of the room where the lone light was burning. In the middle of the floor was spread a sheet, beneath which a form was outlined in grisly significance. Carroll's host lifted the cover.

The woman was white-haired, frail, and wrinkled. One side of her face shone in the lamplight with a strange hue, like tarnished silver. In her throat was a small bluish wound; opposite it a gaping hole.

"Shot!" exclaimed Carroll. "Who did it?"

"Some high-minded Caracunan patriot, I suppose."

"Why?"

"Well, I suspect that it was a mistake. From a distance and inside a window, she might easily have been taken for some one else."

Carroll's mind reverted to his companion's ready revolver.

"Yourself, for instance?" he suggested.

"Why, yes."

"Who was she?"

There was left in the Southerner's manner no trace of the cross- examiner. Suspicion had departed from him at the first sight of that old and still face, leaving only sympathy and pity.

"My patient."

"Have you been running a private hospital up here?"

"Oh, no. I took her because there was no other place fit for her to go to. And I had to keep her presence secret, because there's a law against harboring lepers here. A pretty cruel brute of a law it is, too."

"Leprosy!" exclaimed Carroll, looking at that strange silvery face with a shudder. "Isn't it fearfully contagious?"

"Not in any ordinary sense. I was trying a new serum on her, and had planned to smuggle her across to Curacao, when this ended it."

"Curacao? Then that pass for yourself and wife—By the way, that and your coat are over in the thicket, where I dropped them."

"Thank you. But it doesn't say 'wife.' It says simply 'a woman.'"

"And you were encumbering yourself with an unknown leper, at a time like this, just as an act of human kindness?" There was something almost reverential in Carroll's voice.

"Scientific interest, in part. Besides, she wasn't wholly unknown. She's a sort of cousin of Raimonda's."

Carroll's mind flew back to his fatally misinterpreted conversation with the young Caracunan.

"What did he mean by letting me think that you shouldn't associate with Miss Polly?"

"Oh, he had the usual erroneous dread of leprosy contagion, I suppose."

"May I ask you another question, Mr. Per—I beg your pardon, Dr. Pruyn?" said the visitor, almost timidly.

"Perkins will do." The other smiled wanly. "Ask me anything you want to."

"Why did you run away that day on the tram-car?"

"To avoid trouble, of course."

"You? Why, you go about searching for dangerous and difficult jobs. That won't do!"

"Not at all. It's only when I can't get away from them. But I couldn't risk arrest then. Some one would surely have recognized me as Luther Pruyn. You see, I've been here before."

"Then I don't see why they didn't identify you, anyway."

"Three years ago I was much heavier, and wore a full beard. Then these glasses, besides being invaluable for protection, are a pretty thorough disguise."

"So they are. But the game is up now."

"Yes." The scientist drew the sheet back over the dead woman. "I suppose the sharp-shooters who did the job will report me safely out of the way. It's only a question of when the burial party will come for me."

"Then, why are we waiting?" cried Carroll.

"I couldn't leave her lying here," replied the other simply.

The sound of rhythmical labor came back to Carroll's memory.

"You were digging her grave?"

The other nodded. Carroll, stiffly, for his knifed arm was painful, got out of his coat.

"Where's an extra spade?" he asked.

When their labor was over, and the leper laid beneath the leveled soil, Carroll cut two branches from a near-by tree, trimmed them, bound them in the form of a cross, and fixed the symbol firmly in the earth at the dead woman's head.

"That was well thought of," said the scientist. "I'm afraid that wouldn't have occurred to me."

"You can get word to Senor Raimonda?" asked Carroll.

His host nodded. A long silence followed. Carroll broke it:—

"Then there is no further secrecy about this?"

"About what?"

"Her identity." He pointed to the grave.

"No; I suppose not. Why?"

"Because Miss Brewster has a right to know."

"Do you propose to tell her?"

"Yes."

"Very well," agreed the scientist, after a pause for consideration. "But not until after the yacht is at sea."

Carroll did not reply directly to this.

"What shall you do?"

"Get out, if I can. I'm ordered to Curacao. Wisner left word for me."

"Come down the mountain with me."

"Impossible. There are matters here to be attended to."

"Then when will you come down?"

"Before you sail. I must be sure that you get off."

"You'll come to the yacht, then?"

"No."

"I think you should. There are reasons why—why—Miss Brewster—"

"It isn't a question that I can argue," the other cut him off. "I can't do it." There was so much pain in his voice that Carroll forbore to press him. "But I'll ask you to take a note."

Carroll nodded, and his host, disappearing within the quinta, returned almost at once with an envelope on which the address was written in pencil. The Southerner took it and rose from the porch, where he had flung himself to rest.

"Perkins," he said, with some effort, "I've thought and said some hard things about you."

"Naturally enough," murmured the other.

"Do you want me to apologize?"

The scientist stared. "Do you want me to thank you for to-night's work?" he countered.

"No."

"Well—"

"All right."

The two men, different in every quality except that of essential manhood, smiled at each other with a profound mutual understanding. There was a silent handshake, and Carroll set off down the mountain toward the sunrise glow.



XIII

LEFT BEHIND

Dawn crested, poised, and broke in a surf of splendor upon the great mountain-line that overhangs Puerto del Norte. Where, at the corporation dock, there had lurked the shadow of a yacht, gray-black against blue-black, there now swung a fairy ship of purest silver, cradled upon a swaying mirror. Tiny insects, touched to life by the radiance, scuttled busily about her decks and swarmed out upon the dock. The seagoing yacht Polly had awakened early.

Down the mule path that forms the shortest cut from the railway station straggled a group of minute creatures. To one watching from the mountain-side with powerful field-glasses—such as, for example, a convinced and ardent hater of the Caribbean Sea, curled up with his back against a cold and Voiceless rock—it might have appeared that the group was carrying an unusual quantity of hand luggage. Yet they were not porters; so much, even at a great distance, their apparel proclaimed. The pirates of porterdom do not get up to meet five-o'clock-in-the-morning specials in Caracuna.

The little group gathered close at the pier, then separated, two going aboard, and the others disappearing into sundry streets and reappearing presently at the water-front with other figures. The human form cannot be distinctly seen, at a distance of three miles, to rub its eyes; neither can it be heard to curse; but there was that in the newer figures which suggested a sudden and reluctant surrender of sleeping privileges. Had our supposititious watcher possessed an intimate and contemptuous knowledge of Caracuna officialdom, he would have surmised that lavish sums of money had been employed to stir the port and customs officials to such untimely activity.

But not money or any other agency is potent to stir Caracunan officialdom to undue speed. Hence the observer from the heights, supposing that he had a personal interest in the proceedings, might have assured himself of ample time to reach the coast before the formalities could be completed and the ship put forth to sea. Had he presently humped himself to his feet with a sluggish effort, abandoned his field-glasses in favor of a pair of large greenish-brown goggles, and set out on a trail straight down the mountains, staggering a bit at the start, a second supposititious observer of the first supposititious observer—if such cumulative hypothesis be permissible—might have divined that the first supposititious observer was the Unspeakable Perk, going about other people's business when he ought to have been in bed. And so, not to keep any reader in unendurable suspense, it was.

While the Unspeakable Perk was making his way down the dim and narrow trail, another equally weary figure shambled out from the main road upon the flats and made for the landing. The apparel of Mr. Preston Fairfax Fitzhugh Carroll was in a condition that he would have deemed quite unfit for one of his station, had he been in a frame of mind to consider such matters at all. He was not. Affairs vastly more weighty and human occupied his mind. What he most wished was to find Miss Polly Brewster and unburden himself of them.

At the entrance to the pier, he was detained by the American Consul. Cluff came running down the long structure in great strides.

"Moses, Carroll! I'm glad to see you! Where've you been?"

A week earlier, the scion of all the Virginias would have resented this familiarity from a professional athlete. But neither Mr. Carroll's mind nor his heart was a sealed inclosure. He had learned much in the last few days.

"Up on the mountain," he said. "For Heaven's sake, give me a drink, Cluff!"

The other produced a flask.

"You do look shot to pieces," he commented. "Find Perk—Pruyn?"

"Yes. I'll tell you later. Where's Miss Brewster?"

"In her stateroom. Asleep, I guess. Said she wanted rest, and nobody was to disturb her till we sail."

"When do we start?"

"Eight o'clock, they say. That means ten. Will Dr. Pruyn get here?"

"He isn't going with us."

"Oh, no. I forgot his Dutch permit. Well, he'd better use it quick, or he'll go in a box when he does go. I wouldn't insure his life for a two-cent stamp in this country."

"You wouldn't if you'd seen what I saw last night," said the Southerner, very low.

Wisner, the busy, efficient little consul, who had been arranging with the officials for Carroll's embarkation, now returned, bringing with him a viking of a man whom he introduced as Dr. Stark, of the United States Public Health Service.

"Either of you know anything about Dr. Pruyn?" he inquired anxiously.

"He's on his way down the mountain now," said Carroll.

"Good! He's ordered away, I'm glad to say. Just got the message."

"Then perhaps he will go out with us," said Cluff, with obvious relief. "I sure did hate to think of leaving that boy here, with the game laws for goggle-eyed Americans entirely suspended."

"No. He's ordered to Curacao to stay and watch. We've got to get him out to the Dutch ship somehow."

"Couldn't the yacht take him and transfer him outside?" asked Carroll.

"Mr. Carroll," said Dr. Stark earnestly, "before this yacht is many minutes out from the dock, you'll see a yellow flag go up from the end of the corporation pier. After that, if the yacht turns aside or comes back for a package that some one has left, or does anything but hold the straightest course on the compass for the blue and open sea—well, she'll be about the foolishest craft that ever ploughed salt water."

"I suppose so," admitted Carroll. "Well, I have matters to look after on board."

Into Mr. Carroll's cabin it is nobody's business to follow him. A man has a right to some privacy of room and of mind, and if the Southerner's struggle with himself was severe, at least it was of brief duration. Within half an hour, he was knocking at Polly Brewster's door.

"PLEASE go 'way, whoever it is," answered a pathetically weary voice.

"Miss Polly, it's Fitzhugh. I have a note for you."

"Leave it in the saloon."

"It's important that you see it right away."

"From whom is it?" queried the spent voice.

"From Dr. Pruyn."

"I—I don't want to see it."

"You must!" insisted her suitor.

"Did he say I must?"

"No. I say you must. Forgive me, Miss Polly, but I'm going to wait here till you say you'll read it."

"Push it under the door," said the girl resignedly.

He obeyed. Polly took the envelope, summoned up all her spirit, and opened it. It contained one penciled line and the signature:—

Good-bye. All my heart goes with you forever. L. P.

Something fluttered from the envelope to her feet. She stooped and picked it up. It was the tiniest and most delicate of orchids, purple, with a glow of gold at its heart. To her inflamed pride, it seemed the final insult that he should send such a message and such a reminder, without a word of explanation or plea for pardon. Pardon she never would have granted, but at least he might have had the grace of shame.

"Have you read it?" asked the patient voice from without.

"Yes. There is no answer."

"Dr. Pruyn said there wouldn't be."

"Then why are you waiting?"

"To see you."

"Oh, Fitz, I'm too worn out, and I've a splitting headache. Won't it wait?"

"No." The voice was gently inflexible.

"More messages?"

"No; something I must tell you. Will you come out?"

"I suppose so."

Her tone was utterly listless and limp. Utterly listless and limp, she looked, too, as she opened the door and stood waiting.

"Miss Polly, it's about the woman at Perkins's—at Dr. Pruyn's house."

Her eyes dilated with anger.

"I won't hear! How dare you come to me—"

"You must! Don't make it harder for me than it is."

She looked up, startled, and noted the haggard lines in his face.

"I'll hear it if you think I should, Fitz."

"She is dead."

"Dead? His—his wife?"

"She wasn't his wife. She was a helpless leper, whom he was trying to cure with some new serum. He had to do it secretly because there is a law forbidding any one to harbor a leper."

"Oh, Fitz!" she cried. "And she died of it?"

"No. They killed her. Last night."

"They? Who?"

"Government agents, probably. They were after Pruyn."

"How horrible! And—and Mrs. Pruyn. Where was she?"

"There isn't any Mrs. Pruyn. There never was."

"But the Dutch permit! It was for Dr. Pruyn and his wife."

"Sherwen misread the form. So did I. It read for Dr. Pruyn and a woman. He hoped to take her to Curacao and complete his experiment."

"That's what he meant when he spoke of being lawless, and I've been thinking the basest things of him for it!" The girl, dazed by a flash of complete enlightenment, caught at Carroll's arm with beseeching hands. "Where is he, Fitz?"

"On his way down the mountain. Perhaps down here by now."

"He's coming to the ship?" she asked.

"No; he doesn't expect to see you again. He was coming down to make sure that we got off safely."

"Fitz, dear Fitz, I must see him!"

"Miss Polly," he said miserably, "I'll do anything I can."

"Oh, poor Fitz!" she cried pityingly, her eyes filling with tears. "I wish for your sake it wasn't so. And you have been so splendid about it!"

"I've tried to make amends, and play fair. It hasn't been easy. Shall I go back and look for him? It's a small town, and I can find him."

"Yes. I'll write a note. No; I won't. Never mind. I'll manage it. Fitz, go and rest. You're worn out," she said gently.

Back into her stateroom went Miss Polly. From that time forth no man saw her nor woman, either, except perhaps her maid, and maids are dark and discreet persons on occasion. If this particular one kept her own counsel when she saw a trim but tremulous figure drop lightly over the starboard rail of the Polly far forward, pick up a small traveling-bag from the pier, step behind the opportune screen of a load of coffee on a flat car, and reappear to view only as a momentary swish of skirt far away at the shore end; if this same maid told Mr. Thatcher Brewster, half an hour later, that Miss Polly was asleep in her stateroom, and begged that she be disturbed on no account, as she was utterly worn out, who shall blame her for her silence on the one occasion or her speech on the other? She was but obeying, albeit with tearful misgivings, duly constituted authority.

Eight o'clock struck on the bell of the little Protestant mission church on the tiny plaza; struck and was welcomed by the echoes, and passed along to eventual silence. Within two minutes after, there was a special stir and movement on the pier, a corresponding stir and movement on board the trim craft, a swishing of great ropes, and a tooting of whistles. White foam churned astern of her. A comic-supplement-looking pelican on a buoy off to port flapped her a fantastic farewell. The blockade-defying yacht Polly was off for blue waters and the freedom of the seas.

On the shore, feeling woefully helpless and alone, she who had been the jewel and joy of the Polly bit her lips and closed her eyes, in a tremulous struggle against the dismal fear:—

"Suppose he doesn't love me, after all!"



XIV

THE YELLOW FLAG

The departing whistle of the yacht Polly struck sharply to the heart of a desolate figure seated on a bench in the blazing, dusty, public square of Puerto del Norte, waiting out his first day of pain. A kiskadee bird, the only other creature foolish enough to risk the hot bleakness of the plaza at that hour, flitted into a dust-coated palm, inspected him, put a tentative query or two, decided that he was of no possible interest, and left the Unspeakable Perk to his own cogitations.

So deep in wretchedness were the cogitations that he did not hear the light, hesitant footstep. But he felt in every vein and fiber the appealing touch on his shoulder.

"Good God! What are YOU doing here?" he cried, leaping to his feet. There was no awkwardness or shyness in his speech now; only wonder-stricken joy.

"I came back to see you."

"But the yacht! Your ship!"

"She has left."

"No! She mustn't! Not without you! You can't stay here. It's too dangerous."

"I must. They think I'm aboard. I left a note for papa. He won't get it until they're at sea. And they can't come back for me, can they?"

"No—yes—they must! I must see Stark and Wisner at once."

"To send me away?"

"Yes."

"Without forgiving me?"

"Forgiving? There's no question of that between you and me."

"There is. Fitzhugh told me everything—all about the poor dead woman."

"Ah, he shouldn't have done that."

"He should!" She stamped a little willful foot. "What else could he do?"

"Why, yes," he agreed thoughtfully. "I suppose that's so. After all, a man can't bear the names that Carroll does and go wrong on the big inner things. He has met his test, and stood it. For he cares very deeply for you."

"Poor Fitz!" she sighed.

"But here we're wasting time!" he cried in a panic. "Where can I leave you?"

"Do you want to leave me?"

"Want to!" he groaned. "Can't you understand that I've got to get you to the yacht!"

"Oh, beetle man, beetle man, don't you WANT me?" she cried dolorously. "Didn't you mean your note?"

"Mean it? I meant it as I've never meant anything in the world. But you—what do you mean? Do you mean that you'll—you'll let the yacht go without you—and—and—and stay here, and m-m-marry me?"

"If you should ask me," she said, half-laughing, half-crying, "what else could I do? I'm alone and deserted. And there's only you in the world."

"Miss P-P-Polly," he began, "I—I can't believe—"

"It's true!" she cried, and held out two yearning hands to him. "And if you stammer and stutter and—and—and act like the Unspeakable Perk NOW, I'll—I'll howl!"

If she had any such project, the chance was lost on the instant of the warning, as he caught her to him and held her close.

"Oh!" she cried, trying to push him away. "Do you know, sir, that this is a public square?"

"Well, I didn't choose it," he reminded her, laughing in pure joy, with a boyish note new to her ear. "Anyway, there are only us two under the sun." And he drew her close again, whispering in her ear.

"Oh—oh, is that the language of medical science?" she reproved.

At this point, generic curiosity overcame the feathered eavesdropper in the tree above.

"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?"—"What's he say?"

The girl turned a flushed and adorable face upward.

"I won't tell you. It's for me alone," she declared joyously. "But you'll never stop saying it, will you, dear?"

"Never, as long as we both shall live. And that reminds me," he said soberly. "We must arrange about being married."

"Oh, that reminds you, does it?" she mocked. "Just incidentally, like that."

Boom! Boom! Boom! The mission clock kept patiently at it until its suggestion struck in.

"Of course!" he cried. "Mr. Lake, the missionary, will marry us. And we'll have Stark and Wisner for witnesses. How long does it take a bride to get ready? Would half an hour be enough?"

"It's rather a short engagement," she remarked demurely. "But if it's all the time we've got—"

"It is. But, darling, we'll have to ride for it afterward, and get across to the mainland. I've no right to let you in for such a risk," he cried remorsefully.

"You couldn't help yourself," she teased saucily. "I ran you down like one of your own beetles. Besides, what does that permit for the Dutch ship say?"

"That's for myself and a woman—the leper woman. Not for myself and my wife."

"Well, I'm a woman, aren't I? And it doesn't say that the woman MUSTN'T be your wife." She blushed distractingly.

"Caesar! Of course it doesn't! What luck! We'll be in Curacao to- morrow. I must see Wisner about getting us off. But, Polly, dearest one, you're sure? You haven't let yourself be carried away by that foolishness of mine yesterday?"

"Sure? Oh, beetle man!" She put her hands on his shoulders and bent to his ear.

The sulphur-colored winged Paul Pry stuck an impertinent head out from behind a palm leaf.

"Qu'est-ce qu'elle dit? Qu'est-ce qu'elle dit?"

For the second and last time in his adult life the beetle man threw a stone at a bird.

Four hours later six powerful black oarsmen rowed a boat containing two passengers and practically no luggage out across the huge lazy swells of the Caribbean toward a smudge of black smoke.

"Look!" cried that one of the passengers who wore huge goggles. "There goes the flag!"

A square of yellow bunting slid slowly up the pierhead staff of the dock corporation, and spread in the light shore breeze.

"That's the modern flaming sword," he continued. "The color stirs something inside me. Ugly, isn't it?"

"It is ugly," she confessed thoughtfully. "Yet it's the flag we fight under, too, isn't it? And we'd fight for it if we had to, just as we fought for the other—our own."

"I love your 'we,'" he laughed happily.

She nestled closer to him.

"Are you still hating the Caribbean?"

"I? I'm loving it the second-best thing in the world."

"But I loved it first," she reminded him jealously. "Dearest," she added, with one of her swift swoops of thought, "what was that funny title the British Secretary of Legation had?"

"What? Oh, Captain the Honorable Carey Knowles?"

"Yes. Well, I shall have a much nicer, more picturesque title than that when we come back to Caracuna—dear, dirty, dangerous, queer, riotous, plague-stricken old Caracuna!"

"Then my liege ladylove intends to come back?" he asked.

"Of course. Some time. And in Caracuna I shall insist on being Mrs. the Unspeakable Perk."

THE END