en he was first in Cuba, and, as then, the strains of the
military band of the Cabanas drifted across the bay.

The dwelling of the Captain-General, with the Royal Lottery on the
ground floor, had before it sentries in red and white; the Quay de
Caballeria, reached through the Plaza of San Francisco, was tempered
and pleasant in the early dusk, and at the Quay de Machina was a small
garden with grotesque rosy flamingoes and gold-fish in the fountain.
He sat, as well, lonely, considering and content, in the Alameda de
Paula, where, by the glorieta, it was called the Salon O'Donnell. The
moats, filled with earth, truck gardens, the shore covered with sugar
pans, engaged his absent-minded interest. With the improvement of his
Spanish, he deserted the better known cafes and restaurants, the
insolence of the Castilian officers, for modest Cuban places of food,
where he drank Catalan wine, and smoked the Vegueros, the rough
excellent plantation cigars.

This new mood, he was relieved to find, gave his acquaintances as much
amusement as his public dissipation--it was ascribed to the predicted
collapse of his love affair with La Clavel. She was, he was rallied,
growing tired of his attentions; and, in the United States Club, he
was requested not to drown himself, because of the trouble it would
cause his country. Captain Santacilla, however, studied him with a
growing ill-humor; his peculiar threats and small brutalities had
stopped, but his temper, Charles recognized, was becoming dangerous.
He declared frankly, in the Cafe Dominica, that Charles wasn't the
fool he appeared, and he repeated his assertions of the need for a
deportation or worse.

This was a condition which, sooner or later, must be met, and for
which Charles prepared himself. Both Cubans and Spaniards occasionally
disappeared forever--the former summarily shot by a file of muskets in
a fosse, and the latter, straying in the anonymous paths of
dissipation, quieted by a patriotic or vindictive knife. This, it
seemed to Charles Abbott, would be the wisest plan with Santacilla;
and he had another strange view of himself considering and plotting a
murder. The officer, who had an extraordinary sense of intangible
surrounding feelings and pressures, spoke again to Charles of the
efforts to dispose of him.

"The man doesn't draw breath who will do it," he proclaimed to
Charles, at the entrance to the Valla de Gallo. "It's a superstition,
but I'd back it with my la