“I know I ought to deny totally your insinuations, but I can not help trusting you, Milly.”
“God knows,” she said, “you can trust me utterly.”
“And I will,” he replied. “This puts not only myself but others in your power. You must not breathe a word of it, Milly. I am on just the business you have heard of and on others like it. The profits are something enormous and the risk is proportional. If I had not found refuge behind your subterfuge and quickness I should be now under the certainty of being shot before daylight.”
“Oh, not so bad as that, Jack,” she exclaimed in an excited whisper. “They would never shoot an American citizen that way.”
“The matters I am mixed up in,” he answered, “are not things for which one dares to ask the protection of any flag. I am as near to being a pirate as one can come in these days. And Fonseca is a man who would shoot me first and take the risk of the legation and consulate never suspecting what had become of me, or even of having to reckon with them if they did. He is quick and heavy-handed.”
“I do not think him as ferocious as you do, Jack,” she said; “but I am quite as anxious about you as possible. Sammy’s gossip might be exaggerated and generally is. But Mr. Hernwick is a very different person. And he, while he has had nothing to say about you, has talked to me a great deal about the general situation here. He says that Admiral Mello is at the head of the malcontents and is preparing to lead a revolt of the entire navy. You probably know more about that than Mr. Hernwick. The thing that struck me was this. He says Mello is over-confident and is going to bungle the entire plot from haste and temerity. If Mr. Hernwick says that, don’t you think there is something in it.”
“Indeed I do,” Jack answered heavily. “I have had some glimpses of something of the sort. Now can you solemnly assure me, Milly, that Hernwick did say so? For I have half a mind to give up the whole matter and all its golden promises of fortune. There is another opening for me elsewhere, not so glittering but safer and fairly profitable. Mr. Hernwick is a man I respect highly and no Englishman knows so much about the tangle of intrigues which envelopes this nation. If he had said that to me, openly and emphatically, I should act on it.”
“And won’t you believe me, Jack, and act on what I say? I am so anxious about you?”
The night was clear and cool, the breeze soft and even, it was cosy under the awning and it was very pleasant and very novel to have a woman so interested in himself. He was silent a moment, his elbows on his knees, leaning forward on the camp-stool on which he sat. The tiny ripples swished under the counter as the yacht swung on her cable. A banjo twanged on a vessel somewhere near, a military band was playing a native air in one of the plazas by the water-front, the lights danced on the surface of the bay, and the kitten purred. Jack sighed and said:
“It is hard to let slip such possibilities. But I’ll promise.”