he
houses of their favoured senoritas. Those who wooed the art of music
dragged tirelessly at whining concertinas, or fingered lugubrious
guitars at doors and windows. An occasional soldier from the
_cuartel_, with flapping straw hat, without coat or shoes, hurried
by, balancing his long gun like a lance in one hand. From every
density of the foliage the giant tree frogs sounded their loud and
irritating clatter. Further out, where the by-ways perished at the
brink of the jungle, the guttural cries of marauding baboons and the
coughing of the alligators in the black estuaries fractured the vain
silence of the wood.

By ten o'clock the streets were deserted. The oil lamps that had
burned, a sickly yellow, at random corners, had been extinguished
by some economical civic agent. Coralio lay sleeping calmly between
toppling mountains and encroaching sea like a stolen babe in the arms
of its abductors. Somewhere over in that tropical darkness--perhaps
already threading the profundities of the alluvial lowlands--the high
adventurer and his mate were moving toward land's end. The game of
Fox-in-the-Morning should be coming soon to its close.

Goodwin, at his deliberate gait, passed the long, low _cuartel_ where
Coralio's contingent of Anchuria's military force slumbered, with its
bare toes pointed heavenward. There was a law that no civilian might
come so near the headquarters of that citadel of war after nine
o'clock, but Goodwin was always forgetting the minor statutes.

"_Quien vive?_" shrieked the sentinel, wrestling prodigiously with
his lengthy musket.

"_Americano_," growled Goodwin, without turning his head, and passed
on, unhalted.

To the right he turned, and to the left up the street that ultimately
reached the Plaza Nacional. When within the toss of a cigar stump
from the intersecting Street of the Holy Sepulchre, he stopped
suddenly in the pathway.

He saw the form of a tall man, clothed in black and carrying a large
valise, hurry down the cross-street in the direction of the beach.
And Goodwin's second glance made him aware of a woman at the man's
elbow on the farther side, who seemed to urge forward, if not even to
assist, her companion in their swift but silent progress. They were
no Coralians, those two.

Goodwin followed at increased speed, but without any of the artful
tactics that are so dear to the heart of the sleuth. The American was
too broad to feel the instinct of the detective. He stood as