“Not at all,” snapped Captain Codman. “The company has nothing to do with it. As far as I can see it is only the wild plan of a harum-scarum young man. He has no authority. He’s doing it for excitement, for an adventure. He doesn’t seem to know anything of—of what is going on—and, personally, I think he’s mad. He and his friend are the two men who twice drove past your house this morning. What his friend is like I don’t know; but Forrester seems quite capable of forcing his way in here. He wants what he calls ‘credentials.’ In fact, when I refused to help him, he as much as threatened to come here and get them for himself.”
The voice of Señora Rojas was shaken with alarm. “He is coming here!” she cried. “But if he is seen here they will know at once at Caracas, and my husband will suffer. It may mean the end of everything.” Her voice rose, trembling with indignation. “How dare he! How dare he, for the sake of an adventure, risk the life of my husband? How can he expect to succeed where our friends have failed, and now, when Pino has returned and there is hope.”
“I told him that,” said the Consul.
“You warned him,” insisted the Señora; “you told him he must not come near us?”
Inez, who, with her sister, stood eagerly intent behind the chair in which their mother was seated, laid her hand soothingly upon the Señora’s shoulder.
“Is it best,” she asked, “to turn the young man away without learning what he wishes to do? Living in Porto Cabello, he may know something we could not know. Did you find out,” she asked the Consul, “in what way Mr. Forrester wishes to help us?”
“No,” confessed Captain Codman, “I did not. I was so taken aback,” he explained; “he was so ignorant, so cocksure, that he made me mad. And I just ordered him out, and I told him, told him for his own good, of course,” the Consul added hastily, “that he talked too much.”
With critical eyes Inez regarded her old friend doubtfully, and shook her head at him.
“And how did he take that?” she asked.
“He told me,” answered the Consul, painfully truthful, “that my parrot had said the same thing, and that we might both be wrong.”