“No, but to give up Cortez. He is in bad odor with the President.”
“Oh, I know, I know, but if I changed my friends in order to choose adherents of the administration—! However, I am an administration man. I am almost in the army.”
“Not always the safest place to be.”
“Oh, Cortez is all right, Doctor. You don’t do Cortez justice.”
“On the contrary,” said the doctor, “I do him full justice. I do him the justice of thinking him a very brilliant man,—but I do not walk about arm in arm with him in broad daylight. Is he coming to the party this evening?”
“I expect him.”
“You could not put him off?”
“Hardly. He brings the phonograph to amuse the señoritas. Now, come, Doctor, you would not cut me off from the only man in the country who owns a talking-machine?”
The doctor sighed. “I knew you would be a Yankee,” he said, and turned and walked into the house, while Vickers rode away, resuming his song about his indifference as to the fit of his boots.
Vickers’s house was on the slopes of the hills, and a steep little white adobe stairway led up to it. The house itself was a blue-green color, and though from the outside it presented an appearance of size, it was literally a hollow mockery, for the interior was taken up with a square garden, with tiled walks, and innumerable sweet-smelling flowers. Round the inner piazza or corridor there were arches, and in these Vickers had hung orchids, of which he was something of a fancier. In the central arch was a huge gilded birdcage in which dangled a large bright-colored macaw.