“Oh, I understand,” piped Blythe, cheerily. “I was asleep all the time on the cot under Madama Ortiz’s orange trees; and I shake off the dust of Coralio forever. I’ll play fair. No more of the lotus for me. Your proposition is O. K. You’re a good fellow, Goodwin; and I let you off light. I’ll agree to everything. But in the meantime—I’ve a devil of a thirst on, old man—” “Not a _centavo_,” said Goodwin, firmly, “until you are on board the _Ariel_. You would be drunk in thirty minutes if you had money now.” But he noticed the blood-streaked eyeballs, the relaxed form and the shaking hands of “Beelzebub;” and he stepped into the dining room through the low window, and brought out a glass and a decanter of brandy. “Take a bracer, anyway, before you go,” he proposed, even as a man to the friend whom he entertains. “Beelzebub” Blythe’s eyes glistened at the sight of the solace for which his soul burned. To-day for the first time his poisoned nerves had been denied their steadying dose; and their retort was a mounting torment. He grasped the decanter and rattled its crystal mouth against the glass in his trembling hand. He flushed the glass, and then stood erect, holding it aloft for an instant. For one fleeting moment he held his head above the drowning waves of his abyss. He nodded easily at Goodwin, raised his brimming glass and murmured a “health” that men had used in his ancient Paradise Lost. And then so suddenly that he spilled the brandy over his hand, he set down his glass, untasted. “In two hours,” his dry lips muttered to Goodwin, as he marched down the steps and turned his face toward the town. In the edge of the cool banana grove “Beelzebub” halted, and snapped the tongue of his belt buckle into another hole. “I couldn’t do it,” he explained, feverishly, to the waving banana fronds. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. A gentleman can’t drink with the man that he blackmails.” XII SHOES John De Graffenreid Atwood ate of the lotus, root, stem, and flower. The tropics gobbled him up. He plunged enthusiastically into his work, which was to try to forget Rosine. Now, they who dine on the lotus rarely consume it plain. There is a sauce _au diable_ that goes with it; and the distillers are the chefs who prepare it. And on Johnny’s menu card it read “brandy.” With a bottle between them, he and Billy Keogh would sit on the porch of the little consulate at night and roar out great, indecorous songs, until the natives, slipping hastily past, would shrug a shoulder and mutter things to themselves about the “_Americanos diablos_.” One day Johnny’s _mozo_ brought the mail and dumped it on the table. Johnny leaned from his hammock, and fingered the four or five letters dejectedly. Keogh was sitting on the edge of the table chopping lazily with a paper knife at the legs of a centipede that was crawling among the stationery. Johnny was in that phase of lotus-eating when all the world tastes bitter in one’s mouth.