to-morrow to show them what a clean engine-room looks
like. I've just been talking to the chief. His name's MacKenzie, and
I told him I was Scotch myself, and he said it 'was a greet pleesure'
to find a gentleman so well acquainted with the movements of machinery.
He thought I was one of King's friends, I guess, so I didn't tell him I
pulled a lever for a living myself. I gave him a cigar though, and he
said, 'Thankee, sir,' and touched his cap to me."

MacWilliams chuckled at the recollection, and crossed his legs
comfortably. "One of King's cigars, too," he said. "Real Havana; he
leaves them lying around loose in the cabin. Have you had one? Ted
Langham and I took about a box between us."

Clay made no answer, and MacWilliams settled himself contentedly in the
great wicker chair and puffed grandly on a huge cigar.

"It's demoralizing, isn't it?" he said at last.

"What?" asked Clay, absently.

"Oh, this associating with white people again, as we're doing now. It
spoils you for tortillas and rice, doesn't it? It's going to be great
fun while it lasts, but when they've all gone, and Ted's gone, too, and
the yacht's vanished, and we fall back to tramping around the plaza
twice a week, it won't be gay, will it? No; it won't be gay. We're
having the spree of our lives now, I guess, but there's going to be a
difference in the morning."

"Oh, it's worth a headache, I think," said Clay, as he shrugged his
shoulders and walked away to find Miss Langham.

The day set for the visit to the mines rose bright and clear.
MacWilliams had rigged out his single passenger-car with rugs and
cushions, and flags flew from its canvas top that flapped and billowed
in the wind of the slow-moving train. Their observation-car, as
MacWilliams termed it, was placed in front of the locomotive, and they
were pushed gently along the narrow rails between forests of Manaca
palms, and through swamps and jungles, and at times over the limestone
formation along the coast, where the waves dashed as high as the
smokestack of the locomotive, covering the excursionists with a
sprinkling of white spray. Thousands of land-crabs, painted red and
black and yellow, scrambled with a rattle like dead men's bones across
the rails to be crushed by the hundreds under the wheels of the
Juggernaut; great lizards ran from sunny rocks at the sound of their
approach, and a deer bounded across the tracks fifty feet in front of
the cow-catcher. MacWilli