Kate Meredith, Financier

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

"If you've any balance you find unwieldy, buy Cascaes a smile with it, if you can find one that will fit. No, seriously, old lady, you will be marrying a rich man, although you did not know it when you took him, and you may as well get used to spending. It's no use for us preparing to save."

"No use preparing to save," poor Laura repeated miserably to herself. "There will be no—no one except ourselves to look forward to." But she said nothing of this aloud. She just thanked him, and snuggled in to his shoulder and patted his sleeve.

Far away over the corner of the isle a steamer hooted in the harbor of the Isleta, and the sound came to them dimly through the foliage plants. Carter looked at his watch. "Hullo, I must go, or the criminal who drives my tartana will flog that poor beast of a mule to death in his effort to catch the boat. So now, Miss Slade, just please give me a sample of your best good-bye."

Twilight does not linger in the summer months, even so far north as Grand Canary. The sun was balanced in lurid splendor on the rocky backbone of the isle as Carter said his last words of farewell, making the dead volcanoes look as though at a whim they could spring once more into scarlet life. It was dark when he got on the road, and the evening chill rode in on the Trade. The mouse-colored tartana mule sneezed as he pressed his galled shoulders into the collar.

Carter wedged himself in a corner of the carriage and resolutely looked on life with a reckless gayety. After all, what was this ache called Love? To the devil with it! Hereafter he would eat, and drink, and work, especially work, and—well, Laura was a good sort, and he intended to play the game, and please her. He had given his word to Laura, he forgot exactly why, but he had given it, and that was enough. For good or evil he was one of those dogged Englishmen who keep to a promise that had once been given.

Then with an equal doggedness he thrust all these things from his mind, and resolutely clamped down his thoughts to Tin Hill and the details of its working. No news had reached him of the importance which the freakish British public had placed upon his little arrangement about that detail of the human sacrifices. He saw himself merely as an unknown business man who in the near future would be able to sway a thing which at present he knew nothing about, and that was the tin market. The idea unconsciously fascinated him. He had no enmity against the present producers of tin, did not know indeed who they were, but he smiled grimly as he thought of the way in which presently he would govern them. It was the lust for power, which is latent in so many men, leaping up into life.

The brilliant stars shone down on him from overhead, and the cool Trade carried to him salt odors of the sea, but they got from him no attention. His mind was journeying away in the African bush, on spouting river-bars, in offices, on metal exchanges....

He was roused from these dreams with much suddenness. In his up country journeying in Africa he had developed that animal instinct for the nearness of danger which is present in us all, but in nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of the thousand becomes atrophied for want of use. In the river villages the natives had given him a name which means Man-with-eyes-at-the-back-of-his-head.

It was this slightly abnormal sense that sprang into quick activity, and Carter made so sudden a stoop that his face smacked against the shabby cushions on the opposite side of the tartana. But simultaneously he turned and clutched through the night, and seized a wrist, and held it with all his iron force. A moment later he found with his other hand that the wrist was connected with a long bright-bladed knife, so he twisted it savagely till that weapon fell onto the dirty carpet on the floor. And all the time, be it well understood, no sounds had been uttered, and the mouse-colored mule jogged steadily on with the tartana through the dust and the night.

Then Carter began to haul in on the wrist, and the man to whom it was attached came over into the body of the vehicle, bumping his knees shrewdly against the wheel-spokes en route.