[CHAPTER I.]
CARL'S SERENADE.
Carl Pretzel was singing. If any one with an ear for music had heard him they might have guessed that he was selling fish, or buying old clothes, or having an auction with himself, but not, by the wildest flight of fancy, could they have imagined that he had burst into song.
It was a rare evening in old Belize. The moon was like a big yellow topaz pinned to a cushion of blue-black velvet, and around it lay the stars like scattered diamonds. Carl could not see the moon or stars very distinctly, for it was so beastly hot that the perspiration trickled into his eyes and half blinded him.
The zephyrs, laden with spicy fragrance from orange groves and pineapple fields, breathed softly through the tops of the palms; but Carl couldn't enjoy the zephyrs, for a cloud of mosquitoes was pestering him and he had to use both hands on his guitar.
The house before which Carl was playing and singing was a whitewashed bungalow. Between the bungalow and the street ran a high brick wall. The iron gate leading into the yard was locked, and Carl had climbed the wall, skinning his shins and tearing his clothes. But he didn't mind that. He had read somewhere that when a gay young Spanish blade admires a young Spanish lady, he grabs a guitar and goes and sings to her. Carl wasn't going to let any Spaniard back him off the boards, so he grabbed a guitar and stole like a thief into that Belize yard to serenade Ysabel Sixty.
Carl was not very well acquainted with the lay of the land in Belize. By an error of judgment he had got into the wrong yard, and by another conspiracy of circumstances he began pouring out his enraptured soul under the window of a room in which Captain Reginald Charles Arthur Pierce-Plympton, of the local constabulary, was trying to sleep. Miss Sixty was staying with relatives a block farther on, around the corner of the next street.
Utterly unaware of his mistake, Carl fought the discomforts of his situation and heroically kept to his labor of love. Ysabel Sixty was a fine girl, and Carl had a warm spot in his heart for her.