ll, what did it matter? He had made his effort,
and would, as he had promised Duska, vex his Sphinx with no more
questioning. He would go on as Robert Saxon, feeling that he had done
his best with conscientious thoroughness. It was, after all, only
cutting the Gordian knot in his life. After a moment, he looked up.

"Which way do you go?" he inquired.

The other man shrugged his shoulders.

"I go back to Puerto Frio--after the blow-off."

"After the blow-off?" Saxon repeated, in interrogation.

"Sure!" Rodman stretched his thin hand shoreward, and dropped his
voice. "Take a good look at yon fair city," he laughed, "for, before
you happen back here again, it may have fallen under fire and sword."

The soldier of fortune spoke with some of the pride that comes to the
man who feels he is playing a large game, whether it be a game of
construction or destruction, or whether, as is oftener the case, it be
both destruction and construction.

The painter obediently looked back at the adobe walls and cross-tipped
towers.

"Puerto Frio has been very good to me," he said, in an enigmatical
voice.

But Rodman was thinking too much of his own plans to notice the
comment.

"Do you see the mountain at the back of the city?" he suddenly
demanded. "That's San Francisco. Do you see anything queer about it?"

The artist looked at the peak rearing its summit against the hot blue
overhead, and saw only a sleeping tropical background for the indolent
tropical panorama stretching at its base.

"Well--" Rodman dropped his voice yet lower--"if you had a pair of
field glasses and studied the heights, you could see a few black
specks that are just now disused guns. By day after to-morrow, or, at
the latest, one day more, each of those specks will be a crater, and
the town will be under a shower of solid shot. There's some class to
work that can turn as mild a mannered hill as that into a
volcano--no?"

Saxon stood gazing with fascination.

"Meanwhile," he heard the other comment, "shipboard is good enough for
yours truly--because, as you know, shipboard is neutral ground for
political offenders--and the next gentleman who occupies the Palace
will be a friend who owes me something."

CHAPTER XI

Saxon denied himself the lure of the deck that evening. Though he
would probably be close behind his messages in arriving, he was
devoting himself to a full narration embodied in a love-letter.

He bent over the task in the c