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Manuel turned into the Café de l'Opéra, a tumble-down frame shack with a corrugated iron roof, to order a cooling drink and to puzzle out this utterly baffling mystery. The Cuban's first impulse was to flee. Had anything less imperious than this all-important meeting been before him, Manuel would have made his escape without a moment's delay.
"My child, that man has designs against you; it is time that I told you all I know concerning yourself!" "Do so, father." The old smuggler proceeded and related to Renie all that he had told to Garcia, and also stated the Cuban's proposition.
The officer of the firing squad, mortified by his blunder, hastily whipped up his sword, the men once more levelled their rifles, the sword rose, dropped, and the men fired. At the report the Cuban's head snapped back almost between his shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as though some one had pushed him gently forward from behind and he had stumbled.
O'Reilly wrung the Cuban's hand. Then he stepped out into the night, leaving a pool of water on the clean blue tiles where he had stood. In the days that followed his call on Ignacio Alvarado, O'Reilly behaved so openly that the Secret Service agent detailed to watch him relaxed his vigilance.
Puzzled and dismayed by this unusual behaviour, Harry returned to the house in Queen Square, and ventured for the first time to knock at the fair Cuban's door. She bade him enter, and he found her kneeling with rather a disconsolate air beside a brown wooden trunk. 'Senorita, he broke out, 'I doubt whether that man's character is what he wishes you to believe.
A Cuban's idea of a well-furnished sitting-room is fully met by a dozen cane-bottom rocking-chairs, and a few poor chromos on the walls. These rocking-chairs are ranged in two even lines, reaching from the window to the rear of the room, with a narrow woollen mat between them on the marble floor, each chair being conspicuously flanked by a cuspidor.
It was very cozy, I thought; one could talk right and left, and when the gentlemen circulated about in the entr'actes smoking the inevitable cigarette, which never leaves a Cuban's lips except to light a fresh one, all the lattice-doors are eagerly opened to them. Lola presented all the haute volee to us, the unpresented just stared.
The world wondered a little, just as Lady Sevenoaks wondered, at Smithson's complacency in allowing a man so attractive as Montesma to be so much in the society of his future wife, yet even the censorious could but admit that the Cuban's manner offered no ground for offence.
The Cuban's arms were bound, as are those of the statue, and he stood firmly, with his weight resting on his heels like a soldier on parade, and with his face held up fearlessly, as is that of the statue.
"Yes, yes; Esteban told me all about you." Something in the Cuban's gravity of manner gave O'Reilly warning. A sudden fear assailed him. His voice shook as he asked: "What is it? My God! Not bad news?" There was no need for the officer to answer. In his averted gaze O'Reilly read confirmation of his sickest apprehensions.
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