At the news-stand Minot met Jack Paddock, jaunty, with a gardenia in his buttonhole and the atmosphere of prosperity that goes with it. "Come for a stroll," Paddock suggested. "I presume you want the giddy story of my life I promised you yesterday? Been down to the old Spanish fort yet? No? Come ahead, and there on the ramparts I'll impart." They went down the narrow and very modern street of the souvenir venders. Suddenly the street ended, and they walked again in the past. The remnants of the old city gates restored, loomed in the sunlight. They stepped through the portals, and Minot gave a gasp. There in the quiet morning stood the great gray fort that the early settlers had built to protect themselves from the gay dogs who roamed the seas. Its massive walls spoke clearly of romance, of bloody days of cutlass and spike, of bandaged heads and ready arms. Such things still stood! Still stood in the United States--land of steam radiators and men who marched in suffrage parades! The old caretaker let them in, and they went up the stone steps to stand at last on the parapet looking down on the shimmering sea. To Minot, fresh from Broadway, it all seemed like a colorful dream. They climbed to the highest point and sat, swinging their legs over the edge. Far below the bright blue waters broke on the lower walls. "It's a funny country down here," Paddock said slowly. "A sort of too-good-to-be-true, who-believes-it place. Bright and gay and full of green palms, and so much like a musical comedy you keep waiting all the time for the curtain to go down and the male population to begin its march up the aisle. I've been here three months, and I don't yet think it's really true." He shifted on the cold stones. "Ever since white men hit on it," he went on, "it's sort of kept luring them here on fool dream hunts--like a woman. Along about the time old Ponce de Leon came over here prospecting for the fountain that nobody but Lillian Russell has located yet, another Spaniard--I forget his name--had a pipe dream, too. He came over hot-foot looking for a mountain of gold he dreamed was here. I'm sorry for that old boy." "Sorry for him?" repeated Minot. "Yes--sorry. He had the right idea, but he arrived several hundred years too soon. He should have waited until the yellow rich from the North showed up here. Then he'd have found his mountain--he'd have found a whole range of them." "I suppose I'm to infer," Mr. Minot said, "that where he failed, you've landed." "Yes, Dick. I am right on the mountain with my little alpenstock in hand." "I'm sorry," replied Minot frankly. "You might have amounted to something if you'd been separated from money long enough."