"You're rich. My landlady cleaned me. Is it the practice of beneficent monarchies to provide transportation for their departing guests?"
"Undoubtedly."
Branch coughed dismally. "It 'll be all right if they just buy me a ticket to the first fog. One more hemorrhage and I'll wing my way aloft. God! I'd hate to be buried at sea."
"Cheer up!" O'Reilly reassured him, irritably. "There may be ice aboard."
"ICE!" Leslie gasped. "Oh, bullets!"
In marked contrast to the difficulties of entering Cuba was the ease of leaving it. A ship was sailing from Neuvitas on the very afternoon when the two Americans arrived, and they were hurried aboard. Not until the anchor was up did their military escort depart from them.
With angry, brooding eyes O'Reilly watched the white houses along the water-front dwindle away, the mangrove swamps slip past, and the hills rise out of their purple haze. When the salt breath of the trades came to his nostrils he turned into his state-room, and, taking the crate of cocoanuts with which General Antuna had thoughtfully provided him, he bore it to the rail and dropped it overboard.
"Rheumatism was a fool disease, anyhow," he muttered.
"Great news!" Esteban Varona announced one day as he dismounted after a foraging trip into the Yumuri, "We met some of Lacret's men and they told us that Spain has recalled Captain-General Campos. He acknowledges himself powerless to stem the flood of Cuban revolution. What do you say to that?"
"Does that mean the end of the war?" Rosa eagerly inquired.