The shadows are lengthening toward night when Barker awakens from the sound slumber into which his “siesta” after a comfortable meal has developed. He is feeling greatly refreshed and ready to pick up again the tangled threads of the trail that he has followed so far.
“Now for a little stroll about the city, to see what the place is like,” he thinks, as he lights a cigar and saunters down the broad street.
Half an hour later, Barker has strayed farther from the hotel than he realizes and has unwittingly penetrated into the most disreputable quarter of Havana. For a brief rest he enters a cafe, and seating himself at a table in a corner of a room orders a light drink, absent-mindedly speaking in English.
Two dark-browed, yellow-skinned Cubans, who have been conversing earnestly in low tones at a table adjoining Barker’s, glower at the newcomer, but as he gives his order to the waiter in English they resume their interrupted conversation. Barker idly sips his jerez and wonders what Jack Ashley will say on receiving the letter he left for him in New York.
Suddenly the word “Americano,” hissed by one of the two Cubans, arrests his attention and he strains his ears to hear in what connection the word was used. The pair are talking in low tones, but the detective’s trained sense is able to comprehend the tenor of the conversation.
The Cubans are discussing the assassination of some person, an American, and presumably that American is John Barker!
The detective slips his hand around to his hip pocket, and as his fingers close over the butt of a 38-caliber pistol his pulse resumes its calm and even beat and he proceeds to make a mental inventory of the prospective assassins.
“Absolutely the most villainous-looking brace of cutthroats I ever saw,” he sums up. “But why should they plot to lay me out? Do they take me for a New York millionaire in disguise, and think I carry a million or two around in my pocket? Ah, so you were not the distinguished individual picked out by the precious pair, Barker. It’s some other American. But who? And how can I manage to warn him of his danger?”
Barker rapidly revolves the situation, while covertly watching the Cubans. He suddenly starts, as from words uttered by one of them, as they arise to leave the cafe, he becomes aware that the cold-blooded crime planned within his hearing is to be carried out within the next hour or so.
“There’s nothing for me to do but to shadow the pair,” he mutters, as he steps again into the now moonlit street.