With a wink, he cautiously removed my revolver from my fingers, and slapped me jovially on the shoulder. “Son!” he exclaimed, “I wouldn’t have missed the sight of you holding your gun on that gang for a cargo of bullion. I suspicioned it was you, the moment you did it. That will be something for me to tell them in ‘Frisco, that will. Now, you come along,” he added, suddenly, with parental solicitude, “and take a cup of coffee, and a dose of quinine, or you’ll be ailing.” He pushed a way for me through the crowd of passengers, who fell back in two long lines. As we moved between them, I heard a woman’s voice ask, in a loud whisper: “Who did you say?” A man’s voice answered, “Why, Captain Macklin,” and then protested, in a rising accent, “Now, for Heaven’s sake, Jennie, don’t tell me you don’t know who he is?” That was my first taste of fame. It was a short-lived, limited sort of fame, but at that time it stretched throughout all Central America. I doubt if it is sufficiently robust to live in the cold latitudes of the North. It is just an exotic of the tropics. I am sure it will never weather Cape Hatteras. But although I won’t amount to much in Dobbs Ferry, down here in Central America I am pretty well known, and during these last two months that I have been lying, very near to death, in the Canal Company’s hospital, my poor little fame stuck by me, and turned strangers into kind and generous friends. DOBBS FERRY, September, 1882 September passed before I was a convalescent, and it was the first of October when the Port of Sydney passed Sandy Hook, and I stood at the bow, trembling with cold and happiness, and saw the autumn leaves on the hills of Staten Island and the thousands of columns of circling, white smoke rising over the three cities. I had not let Beatrice and Aunt Mary know that I was in a hospital, but had told them that I was making my way home slowly, which was true enough, and that they need not expect to hear from me until I had arrived in New York City. So, there was no one at the dock to meet me. But, as we came up the harbor, I waved at the people on the passing ferry-boats, and they, shivering, no doubt, at the sight of our canvas awnings and the stewards’ white jackets, waved back, and gave me my first welcome home. It was worth all the disappointments, and the weeks in hospital, to stick my head in the ticket-window of the Grand Central Station, and hear myself say, “Dobbs Ferry, please.” I remember the fascination with which I watched the man (he was talking over his shoulder to another man at the time) punch the precious ticket, and toss it to me. I suppose in his life he has many times sold tickets to Dobbs Ferry, but he never sold them as often as I had rehearsed asking him for that one.