The quininizing of the human race, however, was not the mission upon which Dr. Manuel Valiente Miranda had at present embarked. He had recently made a journey to the United States, whither he had gone to take out a patent on some marvelous "pildoras de quinina" of his own concoction. Having succeeded in the main object of his trip, and having failed incidentally to sell a single box of these same patented "pildoras" to any one of the benighted thousands whose faith was pinned to the ordinary medical practitioner, he had resolved to return to his old occupation of dosing with quinine the faithful on the Colombian coast. On his homeward journey, however, he met a party of Americans who induced him to abandon for a time his original project and to join them in a trip to Bogota. As he was a man of independent means, a political exile from his native land, with no family ties whatsoever, there was nothing to hinder this sudden change in his plans. Hence his presence on the "Barcelona," where he had assumed guardianship over his American friends--whom he abused on occasion, as was his wont with those he liked--and where he engaged in sarcastic tilts with his old ally "El General." In the political upheaval caused by the secession of Panama Doctor Miranda took especial delight; nor did he hesitate to upbraid those in authority for what he called their lack of gumption in the present situation. He predicted, moreover, the coming supremacy of "los Yankees" in South America. In all of this Doctor Miranda was good naturedly tolerated by his Colombian friends, who suffered his sarcasm much as they did his quinine, ignoring the bitterness out of regard for the curative virtue behind it. Harold and Una Leighton, David Meudon, Andrew Parmelee and Mrs. Quayle were the Americans to whom Doctor Miranda had attached himself on this pilgrimage to Bogota. It was an oddly assorted party. That the persons composing it should be voyaging together up the Magdalena, with an eccentric Peruvian physician as a sort of cicerone, and in friendly intimacy with a group of discredited army officers accused of a traitorous abandonment of the national cause, formed one of those curious situations not unusual in South American travel.