Out he went, blissfully unconscious that his straight, flat back, trim shoulders, and precise stride marked him indelibly in a caste strikingly at variance with the business men, generous of girth, careless of bearing, who ventured into Santander.
Early the next morning he started for a ride into the savannas. His mount was a spirited stallion, and his spirits rose, as he cleared the cobbled streets and cantered briskly on. Ahead lay the panorama of the rolling savannas. For miles the lush acres, pale green with sugar cane, rippled like an inland sea. Here and there showed irregular patches of varied crops. The red roofs of haciendas loomed above their blotched huddles of outbuildings. Above them tossed the silhouetted feathers of giant palms against the pale blue of the tropical sky.
To the south the sun danced on a broad expanse of water, where a great bay, with a bottle-neck entrance between bold headlands, lay like a silver mirror in the frame of dark-green shores.
“Ramona Bay! Lord, what a picture!”
His mind raced back to the charts and maps over which he and Dixon had worked out maneuver problems for the admiral. With his background of overseas service, he had been detailed as Dixon’s assistant. All the plans of naval action on the West coast had stressed the overwhelming importance of a base on Ramona Bay. Its seizure by a hostile force would have exposed the fleet’s line of communications to a deadly menace; the home coast to dangerous raids; the diversion of naval units that would be vitally needed in the main theater of operations.
The sudden thunder of hoofs and boisterous laughter broke into his reflective mood. Out from the cover of a patch of woods came the riders. The distance narrowed, and he saw the red piping on khaki uniforms and recognized the riders as the group in the café. There was studied insolence in their faces, and Stanley Graydon reined to one side to give them a wide berth.
The horseman on the near flank, the swarthy colonel, deliberately moved toward him at a lively canter. His own mount, crowded uncomfortably close to the cactus hedge, wheeled and lashed out with his heels. The unshod hoofs drummed viciously into the flank of the colonel’s mount. A riding crop slashed across the rump of Stanley Graydon’s stallion, and a burst of derisive glee greeted the animal’s frenzied leap.
His crop lashed back with retaliatory slash across the colonel’s hands. His stallion, now panicky, bolted. A pistol shot whistled overhead. Furious at his apparent flight, he was unable to check his racing animal until he had covered a full half mile beyond the wooded stretch.
The rest of the day passed without incident, while he gathered information about Santander’s commercial life from the loquacious manager of the hotel. By deft questioning he also learned that the bellicose colonel was Henriquez, commandant of the Palace Guard. The youngster was Captain Juan Navarro, whose father, Don Rafael, was a wealthy landowner on the shores of Ramona Bay, and highly esteemed throughout Santander.
All this, however, held no clew to the patent hostility of the Henriquez faction. At all events, he was determined not to let it disturb his plans for a second ride into the interior, the following day.