Part 12

"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."

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."