“Well, I walked out again,” said the other complacently.
“But you left Panama inside the mouth!”
“Have your joke, Senor Doctor,” said Herran, not relishing the broad allusion to his discomfiture. “But perhaps your American friends here will find a cayman in the bushes. Why do they go to Bogota just now?”
“They are friends to you. With you it is all right.”
“I hear that the peons are rising against the Yankees.”
“The canaille! They can do nothing.”
“Besides,” pursued the general, “excellent and harmless as this learned Senor and his family are, I can hardly appear, under all the circumstances, as protector and champion of a party of Americans.”
General Herran spoke in so rapid an undertone that only one to whom Spanish is the native tongue could have followed him. But Leighton’s keen intelligence, although he was not well versed in Spanish idioms, was quick to catch at least an inkling of what was passing between his two companions.
“There is danger for Americans traveling in the interior?” he asked.
“I not say so,” replied the doctor stoutly.