e meeting?" Cecil
queried.

The boy hesitated, fearing to enrage his questioner.

"Well," he blurted out, "if I must say it, I think that you're plotting
a revolution in this country, putting Leborge up as president, letting
Manuel run the country, driving the United States clean out of it, and
giving you the chance to take all sorts of commercial concessions for
yourself."

The Englishman nodded his head.

"For a guess," he declared, "your idea is not half bad. Evidently, you
have plenty of imagination. The only trouble with your summing up of the
situation, my boy, is that it is wrong in every particular. If you did
not learn any more than that from the conference, your information is
quite harmless. I suppose I can count on your never mentioning this
meeting?"

Stuart thought for a moment.

"No," he said, "I can't promise that."

The Englishman lifted his eyebrows slightly.

"And why?"

Stuart found it difficult to say why. He had a feeling that to swear
silence would, in a sense, make him a party to the conspiracy, whatever
it might be.

"I--I've got it in for Manuel," he said lamely, though conscious, as he
said it, that the reply would not satisfy.

Cecil looked at him through narrowed eyelids.

"I suppose you know that I would have no scruples in shooting you if you
betrayed us," he remarked.

Stuart looked up.

"I don't know it," he answered. "Manuel or Leborge might do it, but I
think you'd have a lot of scruples in shooting an unarmed boy."

"Surely you can't expect me to save your life merely to run my own neck
in a noose?"

"That's as good as admitting that what you're doing might run your neck
into a noose," commented Stuart shrewdly, if a little imprudently.

"All right. But you must play fair. I have helped you. In honor, you
can't turn that help against me."

It was a definite deadlock. The boy realized that, while the Englishman
was not likely to put a bullet through his head, as either Manuel or
Leborge would have done, he was none the less likely to arrange affairs
so that there would be no chance for talk. Haitian prisons were
deathtraps. Also Cecil's declaration that an abuse of kindness would be
dishonorable had a great deal of weight with the boy. His father had
taught him the fine quality of straight dealing.

"Look here, sir," he said, after a pause. "You said that I hadn't got
the right idea as to what you three were doing."

"You haven't."

"Then I can't betray it