Cuba was in a very unsettled state just then, steeped in intrigue and overrun with spies, while among Loyalists and Insurgents alike faction plotted against faction. Both were divided by internecine jealousies, and the mixed population of native‐born Cubans of Iberian blood, Spaniards from the Peninsular and the Canaries, Chinamen, negroes, and mulattoes, appeared incapable of cohesion. Stability of purpose is not a prominent characteristic of the Latins, and while the country drifted in discord towards anarchy, a similar state of affairs existed on a smaller scale at the hacienda San Cristoval. The men who by the favor of the military rulers were allowed to take Harding’s pay apparently disdained continuous effort, and desisted from it to discuss politics on every opportunity; while knives were not infrequently drawn in defence of their somewhat variable convictions. It was with annoyance he found he could not sleep, and resigned himself to pass the weary hours waiting for daylight as he had frequently done before. The perspiration dripped from him, and there was a pain in his joints, for the insidious malarial fever he had contracted in the swamps troubled him now and then, and finding no relief in any change of posture lay rigidly still. A mosquito hovered about him with a thin, persistent droning—and one mosquito is occasionally sufficient to drive a sleepless man to frenzy—but the building was very silent. Appleby could see the faint gleam of moonlight deflected by the lattice on the floor, but the rest of the room was wrapped in inky blackness. He was glad of that for there was a dull ache at the back of his eyes, which he surmised was the result of standing for most of twelve hours in the glare of the whitewashed sheds the previous day. By and by, however, the dead stillness which the droning of the mosquito emphasized grew oppressive, and he found himself listening with a curious intentness for any sound that would break it. He did not know why he did so, but he obeyed the impulse with a vague feeling that watchfulness was advisable. Five minutes passed, as it were, interminably, while he only heard the strident ticking of the watch beneath his pillow, and then the stairway leading to the veranda outside his window creaked softly. That was nothing unusual, for the timber not infrequently groaned and cracked under the change of temperature in the stillness of the night; but there was something that stirred Appleby’s suspicions in the sound, and he raised himself softly when he heard it again. The room he slept in opened into a larger one, which Harding had fitted up as an office, where the safe was kept, but the door between it and the veranda was barred, and Appleby had himself made fast the lattice of the window.