“Caesar! Of course it doesn’t! What luck! We’ll be in Curaçao to-morrow. I must see Wisner about getting us off. But, Polly, dearest one, you’re sure? You haven’t let yourself be carried away by that foolishness of mine yesterday?”
“Sure? Oh, beetle man!” She put her hands on his shoulders and bent to his ear.
The sulphur-colored winged Paul Pry stuck an impertinent head out from behind a palm leaf.
“Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit? Qu’est-ce qu’elle dit?”
For the second and last time in his adult life the beetle man threw a stone at a bird.
Four hours later six powerful black oarsmen rowed a boat containing two passengers and practically no luggage out across the huge lazy swells of the Caribbean toward a smudge of black smoke.
“Look!” cried that one of the passengers who wore huge goggles. “There goes the flag!”
A square of yellow bunting slid slowly up the pierhead staff of the dock corporation, and spread in the light shore breeze.
“That’s the modern flaming sword,” he continued. “The color stirs something inside me. Ugly, isn’t it?”
“It is ugly,” she confessed thoughtfully. “Yet it’s the flag we fight under, too, isn’t it? And we’d fight for it if we had to, just as we fought for the other—our own.”