“There you go again,” Francis interrupted resentfully. “As crazy as everybody else in this crazy country. One moment you bandage up my cracked head, and the next moment you want to knock that same head clean off of me. As bad as the girl taking turns at kissing me and shoving a gun into my midrif.” “That’s right, fire away, I deserve it,” Henry admitted ruefully, but involuntarily began to fire up as he continued with: “Confound you, that was Leoncia.” “What if it was Leoncia? Or Mercedes? Or Dolores? Can’t a fellow kiss a pretty girl at a revolver’s point without having his head knocked off by the next ruffian he meets in dirty canvas pants on a notorious sand-heap of an island?” “When the pretty girl is engaged to marry the ruffian in the dirty canvas pants——” “You don’t mean to tell me——” the other broke in excitedly. “It isn’t particularly amusing to said ruffian to be told that his sweetheart has been kissing a ruffian she never saw before from off a disreputable Jamaica nigger’s schooner,” Henry completed his sentence. “And she took me for you,” Francis mused, glimpsing the situation. “I don’t blame you for losing your temper, though you must admit it’s a nasty one. Wanted to cut off my ears yesterday, didn’t you?” “Yours is just as nasty, Francis, my boy. The way you insisted that I cut them off when I had you down—ha! ha!” Both young men laughed in hearty amity. “It’s the old Morgan temper,” Henry said. “He was by all the accounts a peppery old cuss.” “No more peppery than those Solanos you’re marrying into. Why, most of the family came down on the beach and peppered me with rifles on my departing way. And your Leoncia pulled her little popgun on a long-bearded old fellow who might have been her father and gave him to understand she’d shoot him full of holes if he didn’t stop plugging away at me.” “It was her father, I’ll wager, old Enrico himself,” Henry exclaimed. “And the other chaps were her brothers.” “Lovely lizards!” ejaculated Francis. “Say, don’t you think life is liable to become a trifle monotonous when you’re married into such a peaceful, dove-like family as that!” He broke off, struck by a new idea. “By the way, Henry, since they all thought it was you, and not I, why in thunderation did they want to kill _you_? Some more of your crusty Morgan temper that peeved your prospective wife’s relatives?” Henry looked at him a moment, as if debating with himself, and then answered. “I don’t mind telling you. It is a nasty mess, and I suppose my temper was to blame. I quarreled with her uncle. He was her father’s youngest brother——” “_Was?_” interrupted Francis with significant stress on the past tense.