Harper’s face flushed. “Well,” he said, “it’s Maccario or Morales now.”
He lighted a cigar and sat still, though his big hands quivered now and then, and the veins showed swollen on his forehead. The light grew rapidly dim, and at last Appleby moved sharply when a man came up the stairway with a lamp. Harper laughed unpleasantly.
“It can’t last very long now,” he said. “We’ll know what’s going to happen in the next half-hour.”
Appleby glanced at him languidly. “There is,” he said, “one thing that would induce Morales to let us slip through his fingers.”
Harper stood up and straightened himself, clenching his hands on the chair back as he stared at Appleby.
“If I thought you meant it I’d stop your talking for ever now,” he said. “Oh, I’ve now and then done a smart thing, and nobody expects too much from me, but I haven’t sold a countryman to the Spaniards yet—the devils who sunk the ‘Maine’!”
Appleby laughed. “I think,” he said quietly, “you had better sit down.”
Harper said nothing, but when he turned and flung himself into the chair his eyes were eloquent, and there was for almost an hour a tense silence in the room. It seemed interminable to Appleby, but at last there was a tramp of feet outside, and they rose simultaneously, Harper flushed and Appleby a trifle gray in face. Then there were footsteps on the stairway, and Morales came in with two or three files of cazadores behind him. He glanced at the two men, and his face grew a trifle harder, while a little vindictive sparkle crept into his eyes. Still, his voice was coldly even.
“I had the honor of making you a proposal last night, Senor Appleby,” he said.
Appleby nodded. “I am sorry that I found I could not entertain it,” he said.