Saxon, ignorant even of the other’s presence, had no knowledge of the interest he was himself exciting. Had his curiosity been aroused to inquiry, he might have learned that the man who had recently come aboard was one Howard Stanley Rodman. It is highly improbable, however, that he would have discovered the additional fact that the “stuff” Rodman had asked after as he came aboard was not the agricultural implements described in its billing, but revolutionary muskets to be smuggled off at sunrise to-morrow to the coast village La Punta, five miles above Puerto Frio.
Not knowing that a conspirator was hiding away in a cabin through fear of him, Saxon was of course equally unconscious of having as shipmate a man as dangerous as the cornered wolf to one who stands between itself and freedom.
La Punta is hardly a port. The shipping for this section of the east coast goes to Puerto Frio, and Saxon had not come out of his cabin the next morning when Rodman left. The creaking of crane chains disturbed his sleep, but he detected nothing prophetic in the sound. To have done so, he must have understood that the customs officer at this ocean flag station was up to his neck in a revolutionary plot which was soon to burst; that the steamship line, because of interests of its own which a change of government would advance, had agreed to regard the rifles in the hold as agricultural implements, and that Mr. Rodman was among the most expert of traveling salesmen for revolutions and organizers of juntas. To all that knowledge, he must then have added the quality of prophecy. It is certain, however, that, had he noted the other’s interest in himself and coupled with that interest the coincidence that the initials of the furtive gentleman’s name on the purser’s list were “H. S. R.,” he would have slept still more brokenly.
If he had not looked Mr. Rodman up on the list, Mr. Rodman had not been equally delinquent. The name Robert A. Saxon had by no means escaped his attention.
CHAPTER IX
Puerto Frio sits back of its harbor, a medley of corrugated iron roofs, adobe walls and square-towered churches. Along the water front is a fringe of ragged palms. At one end of the semicircle that breaks the straight coast line, a few steamers come to anchorage; at the other rise jugged groups of water-eaten rocks, where the surf runs with a cannonading of breakers, and tosses back a perpetual lather of infuriated spray. From the mole, Saxon had his first near view of the city. He drew a long inhalation of the hot air, and looked anxiously about him.
He had been asking himself during the length of his journey whether a reminder would be borne in on his senses, and awaken them to a throb of familiarity. He had climbed the slippery landing stairs with the oppressing consciousness that he might step at their top into a new world—or an old and forgotten world. Now, he drew to one side, and swept his eyes questioningly about.
Before him stretched a broad open space, through which the dust swirled hot and indolent. Beyond lay the Plaza of Santo Domingo, and on the twin towers of its church two crosses leaned dismally askew. A few barefooted natives slouched across the sun-refracting square, their shadows blue against the yellow heat. Saxon’s gaze swung steadily about the radius of sight, but his brain, like a paralyzed nerve, touched with the testing-electrode, gave no reflex—no response.