I knew that no human power and no fear could ever make him betray us. Two things never entered my calculations at all; that is, that my right name would ever transpire, or that George and Mac would ever, by any possibility, be brought into question for the fraud.
So I came back from my walk with my plans outlined. It was to remain quietly where we were for a fortnight longer, then take the steamer to Vera Cruz, go to the City of Mexico and there buy an estate, as I had originally proposed. Then, after a few months, leave my wife there and travel incog. through Northern Mexico and Texas, meet Mac and George and afterward return to Mexico.
Not a soul in all Europe knew I was in Cuba, and so long as my name did not transpire I was as safe in Cuba as if in the desert.
Consequently I determined to go on in the same way since our landing. In the mean while I would watch the papers, and if any signs of danger appeared I could take instant measures for my safety.
As the days passed the cable dispatches appearing in the papers increased in volume, and the papers everywhere had editorials, which, as a rule, were humorous or sarcastic, poking fun at the Britishers in general and the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in particular. Then the comic papers took it up, and from week to week published cartoons intended to be funny.
One of the funniest of these came out in one of the New York comics, which appeared after the mail arrived from London with the particulars of the simplicity of the bank officials in their dealings with the mysterious F.A. Warren. This full-page cartoon represented a young dude, seated on a mule, riding down a steep declivity.
At the bottom the devil stood, holding in the fingers of his extended hands a quantity of thousand-pound bank notes tempting Warren, and John Bull stood behind the mule, belaboring it with an umbrella and driving Warren down to the devil.
I tried to keep the papers from my wife, but one day she came home from a visit with a flushed face and eager to talk, and began telling me about some daring countryman of mine "who had the audacity to rob the Bank of England," and "who ought to have a whipping." On several occasions Americans there asked my opinion as to who the party could be.
I always told them he was some clever young scamp, with plenty of money of his own, who did it for the excitement of the thing and from a wish to take a rise out of John Bull.
The next French steamer for Mexico was advertised to land at Havana for passengers and mails for Vera Cruz in a few days, and I determined to sail by her. Soon after my arrival I had formed the acquaintance of a wealthy young countryman of mine from Savannah by the name of Gray. We soon became fast friends, and I had him out to dinner nearly every day. He had a warm friend in Senor Andrez, a rich young Cuban planter, and had accepted an invitation to visit his coffee plantation in the Isle of Pines, the largest of all that immense body of islets and keys of the south coast of Cuba in the Carribean Sea, one of the loveliest tropical isles imaginable, and Gray insisted upon my making one of the party.