Anyhow, they didn't hesitate, these Cuban people that wrote to Jeff from
Cuba--or from a post-office box in New York--it's all the same thing,
because Cuba being so near to New York the mail is all distributed from
there. I suppose in some financial circles they might have been slower,
wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on, but these Cubans, you
know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don't see
in business men in America, and that touches you. No, they asked no
guarantee. Just send the money whether by express order or by bank draft
or cheque, they left that entirely to oneself, as a matter between Cuban
gentlemen.

And they were quite frank about their enterprise--bananas and tobacco
in the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos. You
could see it all there in the pictures--tobacco plants and the
insurrectos--everything. They made no rash promises, just admitted
straight out that the enterprise might realise 400 per cent. or might
conceivably make less. There was no hint of more.

So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was "in
Cuban lands" and would probably clean up half a million by New Year's.
You couldn't have failed to know it. All round the little shop there
were pictures of banana groves and the harbour of Habana, and Cubans in
white suits and scarlet sashes, smoking cigarettes in the sun and too
ignorant to know that you can make four hundred per cent. by planting a
banana tree.

I liked it about Jeff that he didn't stop shaving. He went on just
the same. Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with five
hundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directors
would let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved him
for five cents, in the same old way. Of course, he must have felt proud
when, a few days later, he got a letter from the Cuban people, from New
York, accepting the money straight off without a single question, and
without knowing anything more of Johnson except that he was a friend of
Jeff's. They wrote most handsomely. Any friends of Jeff's were friends
of Cuba. All money they might send would be treated just as Jeff's would
be treated.

One reason, perhaps, why Jeff didn't give up shaving was because it
allowed him to talk about Cuba. You see, everybody knew in Mariposa that
Jeff Thorpe had sold out of Cobalts and had gone into Cuban Renovated
Lands--and that spread round him a kind of halo of wealth