Harper’s smile seemed to express incredulity, and for the first time a doubt flashed into his comrade’s mind. Would he have done so much for Tony if the woman had been any one else than Violet Wayne? The question almost startled him and though he strove to answer it in the affirmative no conviction came. Tony had been his friend, and until he came to Northrop he had never seen the girl; while it was, of course, preposterous to suspect that he had gone out under a cloud for her sake; and yet the doubt remained to be afterwards grappled with. In the meanwhile he brushed the question aside as of no moment. Violet Wayne would marry Tony, and in all probability he had already passed out of her memory. He was, however, glad when a man with an olive face stood up beside the fire and glanced at him with a smile. “Among comrades it is not good courtesy to speak apart, and the English is a difficult tongue to me,” he said in Castilian. “I have apprehended no more in the Havana than the response discourteous, ‘You bedam.’” Appleby laughed. “I fancy you others can beat us in that line,” he said. “Shall we get in to‐night, Maccario?” The Insurgent captain made a little expressive gesture. “Who knows!” he said. “They have two companies of cazadores, but there is this in our favor—they do not expect us. Four days’ march—for troops—from Adeje, and we have come in two! Yes, I think we shall get in, and then there will be trouble for those others in Santa Marta and the Colonel Morales.” Appleby glanced down the barranco, and saw framed, as it were, in its rocky gateway the sweep of plain below. The tall green cane and orange groves had faded to a blur of dusky blueness now, but in one place he could still discern the pale gleam of white walls. That was Santa Marta, and he remembered how they had been welcomed there when, weary and dusty with travel, they had last limped that way. There were no troops in Santa Marta then, and the Sin Verguenza, who did not know that an infantry battalion lay close by, had accepted the citizens’ hospitality, and borrowed much less from them than they usually did when their entertainers had loyalist sympathies. While they slept the deep sleep of weariness the cazadores fell upon the town, and the Colonel Morales allowed a very short shrift to those who failed to escape from it. Therefore Santa Marta was anathema to the Sin Verguenza, and, what was almost as much to the purpose, it was rich. While he watched the white walls faded, and the fire in the barranco grew brighter as darkness closed down. A negro, who removed a kettle from it, carefully put it out, and served them with a meal, though Harper sighed disgustedly as he lighted a maize‐husk cigarette when he had consumed his portion.