The Dust of Conflict

“I wonder if that has any special significance,” he said. “I will not force myself upon the man, but it’s quite evident I can’t afford to stand off if he means to be friendly.”

He met Miss Harding on deck next morning, and she graciously allowed him to find her a chair, pack her wraps about her, and then sit close by talking to her for half an hour, which he had cause for surmising excited the indignation of other passengers. He found her vivacious, witty, and almost astonishingly well-informed, for Nettie Harding had enjoyed all the advantages the great Republic offers its daughters, and these are many. Still, he knew that it is a mistake to overdo anything, and, though Miss Harding still appeared contented with his company, took himself away when two or three of her feminine companions appeared. They had questions to ask and Nettie Harding laughed.

“Then the Englishman can talk?” said one.

“Yes,” said Nettie Harding reflectively, “he can. Still, he’s sensible, and doesn’t say too much. I’m rather fond of those quiet men. There was another point that pleased me. He didn’t hang about where he would be sure to meet me, and then appear astonished when what he expected happened, as some men would have done, but waited until I walked up to him.”

“After all, he only picked you up off the deck. There was really no danger; and I would like to have kodaked you holding on to each other. In daylight it would have made quite an amusing picture.”

“Anyway, I must have hurt him, because he put himself between the rail and me,” said Nettie Harding. “You see, I do weigh something, though I’m a good deal lighter than you are, Miriam.”

Miriam, whose proportions were not exactly sylph-like, appeared slightly nettled, but the others laughed.

“He is quite good-looking,” said one of them. “Now, such a send-off would make a good beginning for a romance. Quite sure you don’t mean to fall in love with him, Nettie? No doubt he’s poor but distinguished, or he wouldn’t be coming out to us.”

Miss Harding smiled, but there was a trace of softness in her eyes, which were of a fine deep tint of blue. “I don’t think so, and there is a difficulty. I’m in love already – with the man I’m going to marry.”

A girl who had not spoken nodded sympathetically, for she knew the story of Nettie Harding’s engagement to an officer of the United States navy who was far from rich.

“This year – next year, Nettie?” she said.

Miss Harding smiled a little. “This one’s nearly through, and I’m going to Cuba early in the next.”

“Cuba can’t be a nice place just now, with the patriots and filibusters running loose all over it,” said the girl called Miriam. “What do you want to go there for?”

“My father’s going. He has a good many dollars planted out there, and I fancy he is getting anxious about them. I quite often go round with him; and Julian will be away in the Bering Sea.”

She rose, for a cold wind still swept the sun-flecked Atlantic; but she spoke to Appleby at lunch, and also at dinner that evening, after which her father carried him off to the smoking-room. There was a considerable difference between their ages and views of life, but a friendship that was free alike from patronage or presumption sprang up between them in spite of it. Cyrus Harding was an American, and what is usually termed a self-made man, but he did not attempt to force his belief in himself and his country upon everybody else, though it was sincere enough. He was typically lean in face and frame, but his dress was as unostentatious as his speech, and he wore no diamonds, which are, indeed, not usually displayed by men of substance in his country. The little glint in his keen blue eyes, together with the formation of his mouth and chin, however, hinted that he possessed a good deal of character.

Being a man who noticed everything, he was quite aware that Appleby spent at least an hour in the aggregate in his daughter’s company every day, and said nothing. Nettie was, he knew, a very capable young woman, and Appleby, he fancied, a gentleman, which was, in the meanwhile, sufficient for him. A friendship may also be made rapidly at sea, and on the seventh day out he asked Appleby a question. They were leaning on the rail together cigar in hand while the ship rolling her mastheads athwart the blue swung with an easy lurch over the long smooth heave of shining sea.

“What is bringing you out to our country?” he said.

Appleby laughed. “What I expect is quite the usual thing. The difficulty of getting a living in the old one.”

Harding looked him over. “Army too expensive?”

Appleby flushed a little. “I have never been in it, though I think I was meant for a soldier.”

“One can’t always be what he was meant for,” said Harding, with a little dry smile. “It’s a general belief among young men in my country that they were specially designed for millionaires, but only a few of them get there. Got any dollars?”

Appleby made a calculation. “Taking the rate at 4.80, I have about one hundred and twenty.”

He had expected his companion to show signs of astonishment at his rashness, but Harding nodded. “I began with five but I was younger than you are,” he said. “Business pays best yonder. What are you strongest at?”

“I can ride and shoot a little, which is what seems most likely to further my intentions, and speak Spanish reasonably well. These, I surmise, are very doubtful advantages, but I have no liking for business whatever. Is there anything to be made out of horses or cattle?”

“Oh yes,” said Harding dryly. “There are men who make a good deal, but you want ten or fifteen thousand dollars to begin with, anyway. It’s only a big ranch that pays. Quite sure you wouldn’t like to try your hand at business? I could introduce you to one or two men if you came out to Glenwood and stayed a week with me.”

Appleby felt that the keen blue eyes were quietly scrutinizing him. “No,” he said. “There is a fact I must mention which I also think would prevent you wishing to entertain me. A business man hiring anybody would have questions to ask, and I left the old country suddenly. I am not sure that a charge of manslaughter has not been brought against me by this time.”

Harding did not seem in the least astonished; in fact, his very impassiveness had its humorous aspect, as Appleby recognized.

“Did you kill the man?” he asked.

“No,” said Appleby, “I did not even attempt it; though in the face of circumstances I think nobody would believe me. Still, that’s a story I can’t go into, though it seemed the correct thing to mention it to you.”

Harding nodded gravely. “The straight road is the shortest one, though it’s quite often steep,” he said. “Now, I had a notion you had some difficulty of that kind.”

“I don’t know that there is anything in my appearance which especially suggests the criminal.”

“Well,” said Harding, with a little laugh, “you didn’t seem quite sure of your own name when you told it me; but I’ve handled a good many men in my time, and found out how to grade them before I began. I wasn’t very often wrong. Now, it seemed to me there was no particular meanness about you, and homicide isn’t thought such a serious thing in my country, when it’s necessary. Before I was your age I had to hold on to all I had in the world with the pistol one night down in New Mexico – and I held on.”

His face grew a trifle grim, but Appleby was glancing out towards the saffron glare of sunset on the ocean’s rim. “I want to live in the open, and see what the life men lead outside your cities is like,” he said. “There is nobody to worry about me, and I don’t mind the risks. Can you suggest anything with a chance of dollars in it a little outside the beaten track?”

“You speak Spanish?”

“I was born at Gibraltar, and lived in Spain until I was ten years old.”

“Well,” said Harding, “as it happens, I can suggest something that might suit you, though I would rather, in spite of what you told me, have found you a business opportunity. The men who play the game will want good nerves, but there are dollars in it for the right ones. It’s running arms to Cuba.”

A little gleam crept into Appleby’s eyes, and he flung up his head. “I think,” he said quietly, “that is the very thing I would have wished for.”

“Then,” said Harding, “I’ll give you a letter to some friends of mine in Texas.”

He went away by and by, and Appleby decided that the cost of his saloon passage had been a good investment. Still, he wondered what Harding could have to do with such a risky business as he surmised the smuggling of arms into Cuba must be, until he strolled round the deck with his daughter in the moonlight that evening.

“I think you have made a useful friend to-day,” she said.

Appleby looked at her with a little astonishment, and the girl smiled when he said, “I don’t understand.”

“I mean Cyrus P. Harding. There are quite a number of men with dollars anxious to be on good terms with him.”

“What have I done to please him?”

“You wouldn’t come to Glenwood,” and the girl laughed again. “No, I don’t mean that exactly, but I need not explain. Cyrus P. Harding never did a mean thing in his life, you see.”

Appleby smiled at her. “So one would surmise. In my country we rather believe in heredity.”

“Pshaw!” said the girl. “There really isn’t much in compliments when they’re served out all round. But if you are going to Cuba I may see you there.”

“Will you be in Cuba?”

Nettie Harding nodded. “My father has no end of dollars there – in tobacco and sugar.”

“I wonder if one could ask what induced Mr. Harding to invest money in such an unsettled country as Cuba is just now?”

Nettie Harding looked up at him confidentially. “It’s a thing I wouldn’t tell everybody, and if I did I shouldn’t be believed,” she said. “Well, Cyrus Harding can see ever so far ahead, and I never knew him mistaken yet. Some day something will happen in Cuba that will give us an excuse for turning the Spaniards out and straightening things up. They need it.”