Appleby stood still a moment, and then, reflecting that anybody who might be following him would expect him to take the broader way, slipped into the narrow street. A day or two earlier he would have laughed at the notion, but the footsteps which had stopped so abruptly troubled him. He had passed one wine-shop when he heard them again, and, though it seemed at least possible that they were those of some citizen going home, there was an unpleasant suggestiveness in them, and when the light of the second wine-shop fell across the street he decided to enter it. If the man behind him also stopped, his motive would be apparent.
Two or three men sat in the wine-shop with little glasses of caña before them, and Appleby was reassured when he glanced at them. They were evidently of the humbler orders, men who earned a meagre two or three pesetas a day; but their garments of cotton and coarse unstarched linen were, as usual, spotlessly clean, and he surmised from their shade of complexion that they had emigrated to Cuba from the Canaries. They saluted him courteously when he took off his hat on entering, and one laid down the torn and wine-stained journal he was reading.
“The war is making sugar dearer, señor,” he said.
Appleby was not altogether pleased at being recognized, as the observation implied, but the man seemed civil, and he smiled.
“It also puts up the cost of making it,” he said, turning to the landlord, as an excuse for remaining a little occurred to him. “You have Vermouth in an open bottle?”
“No, señor,” said the other, as Appleby had expected. “Since the war makes pesetas scarce one drinks the thin red wine and caña here. Still, I have a few bottles with the seal on.”
Appleby laughed. “Well,” he said, “as it has been observed, sugar is dear, and Vermouth is a wine I have a liking for. It is conceivable that these gentlemen would taste it with me.”
The men appeared quite willing, and one of them brought out a handful of coarse maize-husk cigarettes when the host laid down the bottle with the white Savoy cross upon it and a few little glasses.
“It is not the tobacco the senor usually smokes, but his cigar has gone out, and one offers what he has with the good will,” he said.
The man was clearly a peon, a day laborer, but Appleby fancied his manner could not have been improved upon, for it was free alike from undue deference or any assertion of equality. He took one of the cigarettes, and when he had handed round the little glasses sat with his face towards the door. The light from it, as he was pleased to notice, fell right across the narrow street, and he sat with his back to it. He had also not long to wait, for a patter of footsteps flung back by the white walls grew louder, and Appleby noticed that while they had rung sharp and decided they appeared to slacken as the man approached the wine-shop. This appeared significant, since it suggested that the man did not wish to cross the stream of light.