Part 46

The boy-lieutenants broke out into a chorus of delighted thanks. They assured Clay that he was most gracious; that he overwhelmed them, and that it was honor enough for them that they had served under him. But Clay laughed, and drove them off with a paternal wave of the hand.

The officer from the man-of-war listened with an uncomfortable sense of having blundered in his manner toward this powder-splashed young man who set American citizens at liberty, and created captains by the half-dozen at a time.

"Are you from the States?" he asked as they moved toward the man-of-war's men.

"I am, thank God. Why not?"

"I thought you were, but you saluted like an Englishman."

"I was an officer in the English army once in the Soudan, when they were short of officers." Clay shook his head and looked wistfully at the ranks of the blue-jackets drawn up on either side of them. The horses had been brought out and Langham and MacWilliams were waiting for him to mount. "I have worn several uniforms since I was a boy," said Clay. "But never that of my own country."

The people were cheering him from every part of the square. Women waved their hands from balconies and housetops, and men climbed to awnings and lampposts and shouted his name. The officers and men of the landing party took note of him and of this reception out of the corner of their eyes, and wondered.

"And what had I better do?" asked the commanding officer.

"Oh, I would police the Palace grounds, if I were you, and picket that street at the right, where there are so many wine shops, and preserve order generally until Rojas gets here. He won't be more than an hour, now. We shall be coming over to pay our respects to your captain to-morrow. Glad to have met you."

"Well, I'm glad to have met you," answered the officer, heartily. "Hold on a minute. Even if you haven't worn our uniform, you're as good, and better, than some I've seen that have, and you're a sort of a commander-in-chief, anyway, and I'm damned if I don't give you a sort of salute."

Clay laughed like a boy as he swung himself into the saddle. The officer stepped back and gave the command; the middies raised their swords and Clay passed between massed rows of his countrymen with their muskets held rigidly toward him. The housetops rocked again at the sight, and as he rode out into the brilliant sunshine, his eyes were wet and winking.

The two boys had drawn up at his side, but MacWilliams had turned in the saddle and was still looking toward the Palace, with his hand resting on the hindquarters of his pony.

"Look back, Clay," he said. "Take a last look at it, you'll never see it after to-day. Turn again, turn again, Dictator of Olancho."

The men laughed and drew rein as he bade them, and looked back up the narrow street. They saw the green and white flag of Olancho creeping to the top of the mast before the Palace, the blue-jackets driving back the crowd, the gashes in the walls of the houses, where Mendoza's cannonballs had dug their way through the stucco, and the silk curtains, riddled with bullets, flapping from the balconies of the opera-house.

"You had it all your own way an hour ago," MacWilliams said, mockingly. "You could have sent Rojas into exile, and made us all Cabinet Ministers--and you gave it up for a girl. Now, you're Dictator of Olancho. What will you be to-morrow? To-morrow you will be Andrew Langham's son-in-law--Benedict, the married man. Andrew Langham's son-in-law cannot ask his wife to live in such a hole as this, so--Goodbye, Mr. Clay. We have been long together."

Clay and Langham looked curiously at the boy to see if he were in earnest, but MacWilliams would not meet their eyes.

"There were three of us," he said, "and one got shot, and one got married, and the third--? You will grow fat, Clay, and live on Fifth Avenue and wear a high silk hat, and some day when you're sitting in your club you'll read a paragraph in a newspaper with a queer Spanish date-line to it, and this will all come back to you,--this heat, and the palms, and the fever, and the days when you lived on plantains and we watched our trestles grow out across the canons, and you'll be willing to give your hand to sleep in a hammock again, and to feel the sweat running down your back, and you'll want to chuck your gun up against your chin and shoot into a line of men, and the policemen won't let you, and your wife won't let you. That's what you're giving up. There it is. Take a good look at it. You'll never see it again."

The steamer "Santiago," carrying "passengers, bullion, and coffee," was headed to pass Porto Rico by midnight, when she would be free of land until she anchored at the quarantine station of the green hills of Staten Island. She had not yet shaken off the contamination of the earth; a soft inland breeze still tantalized her with odors of tree and soil, the smell of the fresh coat of paint that had followed her coaling rose from her sides, and the odor of spilt coffee-grains that hung around the hatches had yet to be blown away by a jealous ocean breeze, or washed by a welcoming cross sea.

The captain stopped at the open entrance of the Social Hall. "If any of you ladies want to take your last look at Olancho you've got to come now," he said. "We'll lose the Valencia light in the next quarter hour."

Miss Langham and King looked up from their novels and smiled, and Miss Langham shook her head. "I've taken three final farewells of Olancho already," she said: "before we went down to dinner, and when the sun set, and when the moon rose. I have no more sentiment left to draw on. Do you want to go?" she asked.

"I'm very comfortable, thank you," King said, and returned to the consideration of his novel.

But Clay and Hope arose at the captain's suggestion with suspicious alacrity, and stepped out upon the empty deck, and into the encompassing darkness, with a little sigh of relief.

Alice Langham looked after them somewhat wistfully and bit the edges of her book. She sat for some time with her brows knitted, glancing occasionally and critically toward King and up with unseeing eyes at the swinging lamps of the saloon. He caught her looking at him once when he raised his eyes as he turned a page, and smiled back at her, and she nodded pleasantly and bent her head over her reading. She assured herself that after all King understood her and she him, and that if they never rose to certain heights, they never sank below a high level of mutual esteem, and that perhaps was the best in the end.

King had placed his yacht at the disposal of Madame Alvarez, and she had sailed to Colon, where she could change to the steamers for Lisbon, while he accompanied the Langhams and the wedding party to New York.

Clay recognized that the time had now arrived in his life when he could graduate from the position of manager-director and become the engineering expert, and that his services in Olancho were no longer needed.

With Rojas in power Mr. Langham had nothing further to fear from the Government, and with Kirkland in charge and young Langham returning after a few months' absence to resume his work, he felt himself free to enjoy his holiday.

They had taken the first steamer out, and the combined efforts of all had been necessary to prevail upon MacWilliams to accompany them; and even now the fact that he was to act as Clay's best man and, as Langham assured him cheerfully, was to wear a frock coat and see his name in all the papers, brought on such sudden panics of fear that the fast-fading coast line filled his soul with regret, and a wilful desire to jump overboard and swim back.

Clay and Hope stopped at the door of the chief engineer's cabin and said they had come to pay him a visit. The chief had but just come from the depths where the contamination of the earth was most evident in the condition of his stokers; but his chin was now cleanly shaven, and his pipe was drawing as well as his engine fires, and he had wrapped himself in an old P. & O. white duck jacket to show what he had been before he sank to the level of a coasting steamer. They admired the clerk-like neatness of the report he had just finished, and in return he promised them the fastest run on record, and showed them the portrait of his wife, and of their tiny cottage on the Isle of Wight, and his jade idols from Corea, and carved cocoanut gourds from Brazil, and a picture from the "Graphic" of Lord Salisbury, tacked to the partition and looking delightedly down between two highly colored lithographs of Miss Ellen Terry and the Princess May.