"Yes, sir."
"And you live to tell it? You are my idea of a real man!" Rufus Shepley said.
Shepley took a cigar from his vest pocket, bit off the end, lighted it, and puffed a cloud of fragrant smoke into the air. Rufus Shepley was a man of fifty, and looked his age. If human being ever gave the appearance of being the regulation man of big business affairs, Rufus Shepley did.
Sidney Prale had held some conversation with him on board ship, but they had not become very well acquainted, though they seemed to like each other. Each man seemed to be holding back, waiting, trying to discover in the other more qualities to like or dislike.
"Ten years," Sidney Prale went on thoughtfully. "It seems a long time, but the years have passed swiftly."
"I always had an idea," Rufus Shepley said, "that a genuine white man who went to one of those Central American countries turned bad after the first year and went to the devil generally. But you don't look it."
"The idea is correct, at that, in some instances," Prale admitted. "Some of them do turn bad."
"They get to drifting, eh? The climate gets into their blood. Do you know what I think? I think that, in seven cases out of eight, it's a case of a man wanting an excuse for loafing. I knew a chap once who went down to that part of the world. Got to drinking too much, threw up his job, used to loaf all the time, married some sort of a half-black woman who had a bit of coin, and went to the dogs generally."
"Oh, there are many such," Sidney Prale admitted. "But the majority of them are men who made some grave mistake somewhere else and got the idea that life was merely existence afterward. A man must have an incentive in any climate to make anything of himself—and down there the incentive has to be stronger."
"I assume that you—er—had the proper incentive," Rufus Shepley said, grinning.