The nights were ribald and the
days were drear, for fever stalked the streets, but Inocencio was
immune, and for the first time he enjoyed himself.

But he was solitary in his habits; the festering town, with its
green-slimed sewers and its filthy streets, did not appeal to him, so he
took up his abode on the shore of a little bay close behind, where a
grove of palm-trees overhung a sandy beach. Just across a mangrove swamp
at his back was the city; before him lay his schooner, her bowsprit
pointing seaward. Day and night it pointed seaward, like a resolute
finger; pointed toward Hayti and--Pierrine.

In time the mulatto acquired a reputation and gathered a crew of
ruffians over whom he tyrannized. There were women in his camp, too,
'Bajans, Sant' Lucians, and wenches from the other isles, but neither
they nor their powdered sisters along the back streets of Colon appealed
to Inocencio very long, for sooner or later there always came to him the
memory of a yellow girl with a scar beneath her eye, and thoughts of her
brought pictures of a blue-and-gold negro colonel and an old man hanging
by the wrists. Then it was that he felt a slow flame licking at his
tendons, and his hatred blazed up so suddenly that the women fled from
him, bearing marks of his fingers on their flesh.

Sometimes he sailed away and was gone for weeks. When he returned his
crew told stories of aimless visits to the Haytian coast in which there
appeared to be neither reason nor profit, since they neither took nor
fetched a cargo. These journeys came at regular intervals, as if there
arrived upon the hurrying trades a call that took him northward, just
before the seasons changed.

His helpers retailed other gossip also, rumors of a coming revolution in
the Republic, tales of the great general, Petithomme Laguerre, who had
aims upon the Presidency. Inocencio's ears were open, and what he heard
stirred his rage, but he was not a brilliant man, and his brain, unused
to strategy, refused to counsel him. For five years he had studied the
matter incessantly, nursing his hate and searching for a means to
satisfy it. Then, as if born of the lightning, he saw his way.

He consulted a French clerk in the Canal offices, and between them they
contrived a letter which ran as follows:

To His Excellency, General Petithomme Laguerre, Commandant of the
Arrondissement of the South, Jacmel, Republic of Hayti.

GENERAL,--The bearer, Inocencio Ruiz,