第29章

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

MacWilliams approached him as he sat leaning back on the rail and looking up, with the eye of a man who had served before the mast, at the lacework of spars and rigging above him.MacWilliams came toward him on tiptoe and dropped carefully into a wicker chair.

``There don't seem to be any door-mats on this boat,'' he said.

``In every other respect she seems fitted out quite complete; all the latest magazines and enamelled bathtubs, and Chinese waiter-boys with cock-tails up their sleeves.But there ought to be a mat at the top of each of those stairways that hang over the side, otherwise some one is sure to soil the deck.Have you been down in the engine-room yet?'' he asked.

``Well, don't go, then,'' he advised, solemnly.``It will only make you feel badly.I have asked the Admiral if I can send those half-breed engine drivers over to-morrow to show them what a clean engine-room looks like.I've just been talking to the chief.His name's MacKenzie, and I told him I was Scotch myself, and he said it `was a greet pleesure' to find a gentleman so well acquainted with the movements of machinery.He thought I was one of King's friends, I guess, so I didn't tell him I pulled a lever for a living myself.I gave him a cigar though, and he said, `Thankee, sir,' and touched his cap to me.''

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

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

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

``What?'' asked Clay, absently.

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

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

The day set for the visit to the mines rose bright and clear.

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

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

Their coming was a great event in the history of the mines.

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