As Clensy soliloquised over his mad metaphysics, he saw a tawny Hawaiian lift a gun to his shoulder, and prepared to aim at the very bird which had inspired him with such mad ideas. “Don’t shoot, for heaven’s sake,” he shouted, as he leaned out of the window and threw the Hawaiian a coin. “Thank God I’ve saved it,” he muttered, as the aged, dilapidated cockatoo looked sideways from its leafy perch, and muttered its deepest gratitude ere it took its flight. “Perhaps it’s some dismal thought of Sestrina’s reincarnated, now a cockatoo, hovering by my window to let me know the truth why she cannot come? Ah, it’s madness to encourage such fancies. Who would believe me were I to tell how I remember the harvest girls singing as they sat with sickle in hand by their golden sheaves in the cornfields of ancient Assyria? Why did the scent from the big dish of overripe yellow oranges in the drawing-room of my home in England send my thoughts adrift, make me go to sea—in search of what? They said I was a fool—had romantic notions. What are romantic notions? And why do millions of sensible and great-minded men and women kneel in true devotion before the shadowy altar of that Heaven which no living mortal since the birth of Time ever saw except in dreams.”
Crash! Some one had banged at Clensy’s door and had swept his peculiar imaginings and metaphysical speculations to the winds, which are the only elements that know how to deal with such wild fancies.
The next moment Samuel Bilbao’s huge personality and figure stood in our hero’s apartments.
“Well, how are things going along?” said Clensy, as he swiftly released his hand from the mighty grip of his comrade’s painful clasp.
Then Bilbao sat down and informed Clensy that trouble was brewing in one of the South American republics, and that he was wanted. “It’s something better than gun-running; there’s a wealthy president’s daughter waiting to be abducted, whipped off into another state against her will, so that she can marry the rival president’s only begotten son. There’s plenty of money in the game, too.” So spake our worthy friend Samuel Bilbao, giving out hints but leaving Clensy’s brain in the usual maze as to what the big man had on his mind.
“Do you mean that you are leaving Honolulu?” said Clensy.
“Yes, lad, keep your heart up, I must go,” said Bilbao. Nor was he leaving Clensy unduly, for he had stopped religiously with our hero in Honolulu for eight months, and eight months in a place like Honolulu was dead against the grain of a man like Samuel Bilbao.
“Eight months waiting in this hole of a place!” sighed Clensy. “I wish to heaven I’d never seen Port-au-Prince.”
“Cheer up, lad, as sure as God made little apples you’ll see the girl again some day,” said Bilbao. “If a girl with canny eyes like that Sestrina’s got loves a fellow she’ll find some means of letting him know what’s become of her, I know!”
“But supposing she is dead,” said Clensy in a pathetic, mournful voice.