“I don’t know how long we worked for Don Jaime; but it was through two or three rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of three pairs of sail-cloth trousers.  All the money we earned went for rum and tobacco; but we ate, and that was something.

“All of a sudden one day me and Liverpool find the trade of committing surgical operations on banana stalks turning to aloes and quinine in our mouths.  It’s a seizure that often comes upon white men in Latin and geographical countries.  We wanted to be addressed again in language and see the smoke of a steamer and read the real estate transfers and gents’ outfitting ads in an old newspaper.  Even Soledad seemed like a centre of civilization to us, so that evening we put our thumbs on our nose at Don Jaime’s fruit stand and shook his grass burrs off our feet.

“It was only twelve miles to Soledad, but it took me and Liverpool two days to get there.  It was banana grove nearly all the way; and we got twisted time and again.  It was like paging the palm room of a New York hotel for a man named Smith.

“When we saw the houses of Soledad between the trees all my disinclination toward this Liverpool Sam rose up in me.  I stood him while we were two white men against the banana brindles; but now, when there were prospects of my exchanging even cuss words with an American citizen, I put him back in his proper place.  And he was a sight, too, with his rum-painted nose and his red whiskers and elephant feet with leather sandals strapped to them.  I suppose I looked about the same.

“‘It looks to me,’ says I, ’like Great Britain ought to be made to keep such gin-swilling, scurvy, unbecoming mud larks as you at home instead of sending ’em over here to degrade and taint foreign lands.  We kicked you out of America once and we ought to put on rubber boots and do it again.’

“’Oh, you go to ‘ell,’ says Liverpool, which was about all the repartee he ever had.

“Well, Soledad, looked fine to me after Don Jaime ’s plantation.  Liverpool and me walked into it side by side, from force of habit, past the calabosa and the Hotel Grande, down across the plaza toward Chica’s hut, where we hoped that Liverpool, being a husband of hers, might work his luck for a meal.

“As we passed the two-story little frame house occupied by the American Club, we noticed that the balcony had been decorated all around with wreaths of evergreens and flowers, and the flag was flying from the pole on the roof.  Stanzey, the consul, and Arkright, a gold-mine owner, were smoking on the balcony.  Me and Liverpool waved our dirty hands toward ’em and smiled real society smiles; but they turned their backs to us and went on talking.  And we had played whist once with the two of ’em up to the time when Liverpool held all thirteen trumps for four hands in succession.  It was some holiday, we knew; but we didn’t know the day nor the year.

“A little further along we saw a reverend man named Pendergast, who had come to Soledad to build a church, standing under a cocoanut palm with his little black alpaca coat and green umbrella.