l so mighty well sure they won't be let go down to
Bavaro for the Saint Gavino kick-up to-morrow that they've settled to do
that. If there ain't no portering to do, they'll be _let_ go. That's how
they look at it. They don't care, not a peseta between 'em, how much it
costs the company to get the machine put right again; not them skunks
don't. What they want is to have a twelve-hour go at the wine in the
valley. You won't tell of me, Don Jimmy?"

"S--s--snakes!" said Jimmy.

Then he had started to run from the Lago Frio, with his coat on his arm.
Dressing was a quick job in those wilds, where at midday in summer one
didn't want much clothing.

"No, I won't let on!" he had cried back over his shoulder.

Toro, the Cuban kiddy, sat down on the margin of the cold blue lake and
finished his cigarette reflectively. White folks, especially white
English-speaking ones, were rather unsatisfactory. He liked them,
because as a rule he could trust them. But Don Jimmy needn't have
hurried away like that. He, Toro, hoped to have had licence to draw his
pay for fully another hour's enjoyable idleness. As things were,
however, Don Alonso, the foreman, would be sure to be down on him if he
were two minutes after Don Jimmy among the red-earth heaps and the
galvanised shanties of the calamine mine on its perch eight hundred feet
sheer above the Vega Verde.

Jim Cayley was a few moments late for the soup after all.

"I s--s--say!" he began, as he bounced into the room.

"Say nothing, my lad!" exclaimed Don Alfredo, looking up from his
newspaper.

[Words missing in original] mail had just arrived--an eight-mile climb,
made daily, both ways, by one of the gang.

Mrs. Jumbo, the moustached old Spanish lady who looked after the house,
put his soup before Jimmy.

"Eat, my dear," she said in Spanish, caressing his damp hair--one of her
many amiable yet detested little tricks, to signify her admiration of
Jim's fresh complexion and general style of beauty.

"But it's--it's--it's most imp--p--p----"

Don Ferdinando set down his spoon. He also let the highly grave letter
from London which he was reading slip into his soup.

"I tell you what, Cayley," he said, "if you don't crush this young
brother of yours, I will. This is a matter of life or death, and I
_must_ have a clear head to think it out."

"I was only saying," cried Jim desperately. But his brother stopped him.

"Hold your tongue, Jim," he said. "We've worry enough to go