This was too much!
"You've been seeing too many movies, or reading dime-novel trash," the official flung back. "Besides, this isn't the place to come to. Go and tell your troubles to the consul at Port-au-Prince."
He rang to have the boy shown out.
The next visitor to the vice-consul, who had been cooling his heels in the outer office while Stuart was vainly endeavoring to tell his story, was the Special Correspondent of a New York paper. It was his habit to drop in from time to time to see the vice-consul and to get the latest official news to be cabled to his paper.
"I wish you'd been here half-an-hour ago, Dinville, and saved me from having to listen to a blood-and-thunder yarn about pirates and plots and revolutions and the deuce knows what!" the official exclaimed petulantly.
"From that kid who just went out?" queried the newspaper man casually, nosing a story, but not wanting to seem too eager.
"Yes, the little idiot! You'd think, from the way he talked, that the West Indies was just about ready to blow up!"
His bile thus temporarily relieved, the official turned to the matter in hand, and proceeded to give out such items of happenings at the consulate as would be of interest to the general public.
The newspaper man made his stay as brief as he decently could. He wanted to trace that boy. Finding out from the clerk that the boy had come in from the east by train, and, having noted for himself that the lad was in rags, the Special Correspondent—an old-time New York reporter—felt sure that the holder of the story must be hungry and that he did not have much money. Accordingly, he searched the nearest two or three cheap restaurants, and, sure enough, found Stuart in the third one he entered.
Ordering a cup of coffee and some pastry, the reporter seated himself at Stuart's table and deftly got into conversation with him. Inventing, for the moment, a piece of news which would turn the topic to Haiti, Dinville succeeding in making the boy tell him, as though by accident, that he had recently been in Haiti.