The other man shrugged his shoulders.
“I go back to Puerto Frio—after the blow-off.”
“After the blow-off?” Saxon repeated, in interrogation.
“Sure!” Rodman stretched his thin hand shoreward, and dropped his voice. “Take a good look at yon fair city,” he laughed, “for, before you happen back here again, it may have fallen under fire and sword.”
The soldier of fortune spoke with some of the pride that comes to the man who feels he is playing a large game, whether it be a game of construction or destruction, or whether, as is oftener the case, it be both destruction and construction.
The painter obediently looked back at the adobe walls and cross-tipped towers.
“Puerto Frio has been very good to me,” he said, in an enigmatical voice.
But Rodman was thinking too much of his own plans to notice the comment.
“Do you see the mountain at the back of the city?” he suddenly demanded. “That’s San Francisco. Do you see anything queer about it?”
The artist looked at the peak rearing its summit against the hot blue overhead, and saw only a sleeping tropical background for the indolent tropical panorama stretching at its base.