“They’re all right, if you know how to handle ’em. Take that boy of mine up there on the cargo. Mighty good boy. I got ’im tied up with rope just now. Came in drunk and kinder ugly last night. But he’s comin’ out of it. I’ll buy him a bracer at the next stop, and he’ll be all right. Best boy on the road.”
Bill spoke always with conviction. He finished off each sentence with ejaculations suitable only to the pulpit. Then he spat.
“I wouldn’t go home for a million dollars. Can’t stand the damned sissies back there. Give me roughnecks! I ain’t got much use for them society fellows. I’ve got a brother in Minneapolis. He was a regular guy when we was kids. Could lick anybody in school. But he made a lot of money and married one of them fiddle-ly-diddle-lies, and went all to pieces. I came home to see him two years ago. He met me at the station with a big car, all dressed up in a fur overcoat, and he says, ‘Bill, you’re just in time for luncheon.’ I looked at him. I says, ‘I guess you mean lunch, don’t you?’ He took me to a regular mansion. Out came the fiddle-ly-diddle-ly. He says, ‘Mable, may I present my long-lost brother from Honduras?’ Christ! Why couldn’t he say, ‘Bill, meet the old woman’? She holds out her hand, way up in the air, like they do in the movies, and says, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’ God!”
He gave the wheel a violent twist, and we shot around a mountain cliff. He drove along a narrow precipice with one wheel almost hanging over the rugged gulch below.
“They took me down to ‘luncheon.’ One of them big English stiffs in a boiled shirt came out and gave us each a little cup of soup and a cracker. I just looked at my brother. ‘Joe,’ I says, ‘ain’t this lime-juicer goin’ to give us nothin’ to eat?’ He says, ‘We’ll have dinner in the evening; you’ll soon get accustomed to it.’ ‘Accustomed hell!’ I says; ‘to-night I’ll be down in a restaurant, gettin’ a regular feed. I’ll be eatin’ corn-beef and cabbage, same as you used to eat. I ain’t sore at you, Joe, I’m disappointed. You was a regular guy before you got them society ideas. But you don’t make a sissy out of me. I’m goin’ straight back to Honduras.’”
He drove along the precipice with savage relish. Presently, as we passed a little native farm in a rugged valley, he called my attention to it.
“That’s where my wife comes from. No fiddle-ly-diddle-ly for me. She’s an Indian—pure-blooded Indian—but she’s white—whiter’n you are—and a damned good wife, too. We don’t take luncheon in our house. We eat lunch. Luncheon! Christ!”
VI
No one having shot at us from the hills or blown up a bridge, we raced into Tegucigalpa in the early afternoon.
Every one in the Capital was awaiting the revolution, but the city remained unperturbed.