Harding nodded gravely. “The straight road is the shortest one, though it’s quite often steep,” he said. “Now, I had a notion you had some difficulty of that kind.”
“I don’t know that there is anything in my appearance which especially suggests the criminal.”
“Well,” said Harding, with a little laugh, “you didn’t seem quite sure of your own name when you told it me; but I’ve handled a good many men in my time, and found out how to grade them before I began. I wasn’t very often wrong. Now, it seemed to me there was no particular meanness about you, and homicide isn’t thought such a serious thing in my country, when it’s necessary. Before I was your age I had to hold on to all I had in the world with the pistol one night down in New Mexico—and I held on.”
His face grew a trifle grim, but Appleby was glancing out towards the saffron glare of sunset on the ocean’s rim. “I want to live in the open, and see what the life men lead outside your cities is like,” he said. “There is nobody to worry about me, and I don’t mind the risks. Can you suggest anything with a chance of dollars in it a little outside the beaten track?”
“You speak Spanish?”
“I was born at Gibraltar, and lived in Spain until I was ten years old.”
“Well,” said Harding, “as it happens, I can suggest something that might suit you, though I would rather, in spite of what you told me, have found you a business opportunity. The men who play the game will want good nerves, but there are dollars in it for the right ones. It’s running arms to Cuba.”
A little gleam crept into Appleby’s eyes, and he flung up his head. “I think,” he said quietly, “that is the very thing I would have wished for.”
“Then,” said Harding, “I’ll give you a letter to some friends of mine in Texas.”
He went away by and by, and Appleby decided that the cost of his saloon passage had been a good investment. Still, he wondered what Harding could have to do with such a risky business as he surmised the smuggling of arms into Cuba must be, until he strolled round the deck with his daughter in the moonlight that evening.