"You are damned right--he looked like you!" Rodman halted, amazed into silence. At last, he said: "Well, you have got the clear nerve! What's the idea, anyhow. Don't you trust me?" The artist laughed. "I hardly thought you would credit it," he said. "After all, that doesn't make much difference. The point is, my dear boy, _I_ know it." But Rodman's debonair smile soon returned. He held up his hand with a gesture of acceptance. "What difference does it make? A gentleman likes to change his linen--why not his personality? I dare say it's a very decent impulse." For a moment, Saxon looked up with an instinctive resentment for the politely phrased skepticism of the other. Then, his displeasure changed to a smile. He had, for a moment, felt the same doubt when Mr. Pendleton brought his verdict. Rodman had none of the facts, and a glance at the satirical features showed that it would be impossible for this unimaginative adventurer to construe premises to a seemingly impossible conclusion. He was the materialist, and dealt in palpable appearances. After all, what did it matter? He had made his effort, and would, as he had promised Duska, vex his Sphinx with no more questioning. He would go on as Robert Saxon, feeling that he had done his best with conscientious thoroughness. It was, after all, only cutting the Gordian knot in his life. After a moment, he looked up. "Which way do you go?" he inquired. The other man shrugged his shoulders. "I go back to Puerto Frio--after the blow-off." "After the blow-off?" Saxon repeated, in interrogation. "Sure!" Rodman stretched his thin hand shoreward, and dropped his voice. "Take a good look at yon fair city," he laughed, "for, before you happen back here again, it may have fallen under fire and sword." The soldier of fortune spoke with some of the pride that comes to the man who feels he is playing a large game, whether it be a game of construction or destruction, or whether, as is oftener the case, it be both destruction and construction. The painter obediently looked back at the adobe walls and cross-tipped towers. "Puerto Frio has been very good to me," he said, in an enigmatical voice. But Rodman was thinking too much of his own plans to notice the comment. "Do you see the mountain at the back of the city?" he suddenly demanded. "That's San Francisco. Do you see anything queer about it?" The artist looked at the peak rearing its summit against the hot blue overhead, and saw only a sleeping tropical background for the indolent tropical panorama stretching at its base. "Well--" Rodman dropped his voice yet lower--"if you had a pair of field glasses and studied the heights, you could see a few black specks that are just now disused guns. By day after to-morrow, or, at the latest, one day more, each of those specks will be a crater, and the town will be under a shower of solid shot. There's some class to work that can turn as mild a mannered hill as that into a volcano--no?"