A whistle came to them through the open windows, and a man’s voice calling: 

“Wemple!  Open the door!  It’s Habert!  Want to talk to you!”

Wemple went down, returning in several minutes with a tidily-paunched, well-built, gray-haired American of fifty.  He shook hands with Davies and flung himself into a chair, breathing heavily.  He did not relinquish his clutch on the Colt’s 44 automatic pistol, although he immediately addressed himself to the task of fishing a filled clip of cartridges from the pocket of his linen coat.  He had arrived hatless and breathless, and the blood from a stone-cut on the cheek oozed down his face.  He, too, in a fit of anger, springing to his feet when he had changed clips in his pistol, burst out with mouth-filling profanity.

“They had an American flag in the dirt, stamping and spitting on it.  And they told me to spit on it.”

Wemple and Davies regarded him with silent interrogation.

“Oh, I know what you’re wondering!” he flared out.  “Would I a-spit on it in the pinch?  That’s what’s eating you.  I’ll answer.  Straight out, brass tacks, I WOULD.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

He paused to help himself to a cigar from the box on the table and to light it with a steady and defiant hand.

“Hell!—­I guess this neck of the woods knows Anthony Habert, and you can bank on it that it’s never located his yellow streak.  Sure, in the pinch, I’d spit on Old Glory.  What the hell d’ye think I’m going on the streets for a night like this?  Didn’t I skin out of the Southern Hotel half an hour ago, where there are forty buck Americans, not counting their women, and all armed?  That was safety.  What d’ye think I came here for?—­to rescue you?”

His indignation lumped his throat into silence, and he seemed shaken as with an apoplexy.

“Spit it out,” Davies commanded dryly.

“I’ll tell you,” Habert exploded.  “It’s Billy Boy.  Fifty miles up country and twenty-thousand throat-cutting federals and rebels between him and me.  D’ye know what that boy’d do, if he was here in Tampico and I was fifty miles up the Panuco?  Well, I know.  And I’m going to do the same—­go and get him.”

“We’re figuring on going up,” Wemple assured him.

“And that’s why I headed here—­Miss Drexel, of course?”

Both men acquiesced and smiled.  It was a time when men dared speak of matters which at other times tabooed speech.

“Then the thing’s to get started,” Habert exclaimed, looking at his watch.  “It’s midnight now.  We’ve got to get to the river and get a boat—­”

But the clamor of the returning mob came through the windows in answer.

Davies was about to speak, when the telephone rang, and Wemple sprang to the instrument.