looked him over. “Army too expensive?”
Appleby flushed a little. “I have never been in it, though I think I was meant for a soldier.”
“One can’t always be what he was meant for,” said Harding, with a little dry smile. “It’s a general belief among young men in my country that they were specially designed for millionaires, but only a few of them get there. Got any dollars?”
Appleby made a calculation. “Taking the rate at 4.80, I have about one hundred and twenty.”
He had expected his companion to show signs of astonishment at his rashness, but Harding nodded. “I began with five but I was younger than you are,” he said. “Business pays best yonder. What are you strongest at?”
“I can ride and shoot a little, which is what seems most likely to further my intentions, and speak Spanish reasonably well. These, I surmise, are very doubtful advantages, but I have no liking for business whatever. Is there anything to be made out of horses or cattle?”
“Oh yes,” said Harding dryly. “There are men who make a good deal, but you want ten or fifteen thousand dollars to begin with, anyway. It’s only a big ranch that pays. Quite sure you wouldn’t like to try your hand at business? I could introduce you to one or two men if you came out to Glenwood and stayed a week with me.”
Appleby felt that the keen blue eyes were quietly scrutinizing him. “No,” he said. “There is a fact I must mention which I also think would prevent you wishing to entertain me. A business man hiring anybody would have questions to ask, and I left the old country suddenly. I am not sure that a charge of manslaughter has not been brought against me by this time.”
Harding did not seem in the least astonished; in fact, his very impassiveness had its humorous aspect, as Appleby recognized.
“Did you kill the man?” he asked.
“No,” said Appleby, “I did not even attempt it; though in the face of circumstances I think nobody would believe me. Still, that’s a story I can’t go into, though it seemed the correct thing to mention it to you.”
Harding nodded gravely. “The straight road is the shortest one, though it’s quite often steep,” he said. “Now, I had a notion you had some difficulty of that kind.”
“I don’t know that there is anything in my appearance which especially suggests the criminal.”
“Well,” said Harding, with a little laugh, “you didn’t seem quite sure of your own name when you told it me; but I’ve handled a good many men in my time, and found out how to grade them before I began. I wasn’t very often wrong. Now, it seemed to me there was no particular meanness about you, and homicide isn’t thought such a serious thing in my country, when it’s necessary. Before I was your age I had to hold on to all I had in the world with the pistol one night down in New Mexico – and I held on.”
His face grew a trifle grim, but Appleby was glancing out towards the saffron glare of sunset on the ocean’s rim. “I want to live in the open, and see what the life men lead outside your cities is like,” he said. “There is nobody to worry about me, and I don’t mind the risks. Can you suggest anything with a chance of dollars in it a little outside the beaten track?”
“You speak Spanish?”
“I was born at Gibraltar, and lived in Spain until I was ten years old.”
“Well,” said Harding, “as it happens, I can suggest something that might suit you, though I would rather, in spite of what you told me, have found you a business opportunity. The men who play the game will want good nerves, but there are dollars in it for the right ones. It’s running arms to Cuba.”
A little gleam crept into Appleby’s eyes, and he flung up his head. “I think,” he said quietly, “that is the very thing I would have wished for.”
“Then,” said Harding, “I’ll give you a letter to some friends of mine in Texas.”
He went away by and by, and Appleby decided that the cost of his saloon passage had been a good investment. Still, he wondered what Harding could have to do with such a risky business as he surmised the smuggling of arms into Cuba must be, until he strolled round the deck with his daughter in the moonlight that evening.
“I think you have made a useful friend to-day,” she said.
Appleby looked at her with a little astonishment, and the girl smiled when he said, “I don’t understand.”
“I mean Cyrus P. Harding. There are quite a number of men with dollars anxious to be on good terms with him.”
“What have I done to please him?”
“You wouldn’t come to Glenwood,” and the girl laughed again. “No, I don’t mean that exactly, but I need not explain. Cyrus P. Harding never did a mean thing in his life, you see.”
Appleby smiled at her. “So one would surmise. In my country we rather believe in heredity.”
“Pshaw!” said the girl. “There really isn’t much in compliments when they’re served out all round. But if you are going to Cuba I may see you there.”
“Will you be in Cuba?”
Nettie Harding nodded. “My father has no end of dollars there – in tobacco and sugar.”
“I wonder if one could ask what induced Mr. Harding to invest money in such an unsettled country as Cuba is just now?”
Nettie Harding looked up at him confidentially. “It’s a thing I wouldn’t tell everybody, and if I did I shouldn’t be believed,” she said. “Well, Cyrus Harding can see ever so far ahead, and I never knew him mistaken yet. Some day something will happen in Cuba that will give us an excuse for turning the Spaniards out and straightening things up. They need it.”
“But if the thing doesn’t happen?”
Nettie Harding laughed. “Then I shouldn’t wonder if he and a few other men made it.”
Some of her companions joined them, and she said nothing more to Appleby; but they met again that evening, and she induced him to promise that he would spend at least one day at Glenwood, while when they disembarked in New York Harding walked down the gangway with his hand on Appleby’s shoulder as though on excellent terms with him. He also kept him in conversation during the Customs searching, and when a little unobtrusive man sauntered by said to the officer, “Can’t you go through this gentleman’s baggage next? He is coming to Glenwood with me.”
The unobtrusive man drew a little nearer, glancing at Appleby, and then touched Harding’s shoulder.
“Is that gentleman a friend of yours, Mr. Harding?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Harding. “He is staying with me. We have business on hand we couldn’t fix up at sea.”
Appleby caught his warning glance, and stood very still with his heart thumping, apparently gazing at something across the shed, go that the man could only see the back of his head.
“In that case, I guess I’m wasting time,” said the man, who laughed. “Still, you understand we have to take precautions, Mr. Harding.”
He went away, and Appleby turned
