dn't remember in which shack that engineer lives."

MacWilliams jumped from his bed and began kicking about the floor for
his boots. "Oh, that's all right," he said. "I wasn't asleep, I was
just--" he lowered his voice that Langham might not hear him through
the canvas partitions--"I was just lying awake playing duets with the
President, and racing for the International Cup in my new centre-board
yacht, that's all!"

MacWilliams buttoned a waterproof coat over his pajamas and stamped his
bare feet into his boots. "Oh, I tell you, Clay," he said with a grim
chuckle, "we're mixing right in with the four hundred, we are! I'm
substitute and understudy when anybody gets ill. We're right in our
own class at last! Pure amateurs with no professional record against
us. Me and President Langham, I guess!" He struck a match and lit the
smoky wick in a tin lantern.

"But now," he said, cheerfully, "my time being too valuable for me to
sleep, I will go wake up that nigger engine-driver and set his alarm
clock at five-thirty. Five-thirty, I believe you said. All right;
good-night." And whistling cheerfully to himself MacWilliams
disappeared up the hill, his body hidden in the darkness and his legs
showing fantastically in the light of the swinging lantern.

Clay walked out upon the veranda and stood with his back to one of the
pillars. MacWilliams and his pleasantries disturbed and troubled him.
Perhaps, after all, the boy was right. It seemed absurd, but it was
true. They were only employees of Langham--two of the thousands of
young men who were working all over the United States to please him, to
make him richer, to whom he was only a name and a power, which meant an
increase of salary or the loss of place.

Clay laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He knew that he was not in
that class; if he did good work it was because his self-respect
demanded it of him; he did not work for Langham or the Olancho Mining
Company (Limited). And yet he turned with almost a feeling of
resentment toward the white yacht lying calmly in magnificent repose a
hundred yards from his porch.

He could see her as clearly in her circle of electric lights as though
she were a picture and held in the light of a stereopticon on a screen.
He could see her white decks, and the rails of polished brass, and the
comfortable wicker chairs and gay cushions and flat coils of rope, and
the tapering masts and intricate rigging. How easy it was made f