Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm
and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace.

"Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the impression that
wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar
would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had
gone between. From one long silence he said: 'I think I'll come back
here this winter and bring Mrs. Davis with me--stay a couple of
months.' What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her
and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background.

"The picture people began their film with a showing of the 'mountains
which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles
of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the
water.' That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago.
'The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against
those five mountains and then they had to fall back.' How natural for
one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape and yet
how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the elemental fight that it
recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle
that is so much of his book.

"We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had
planted his banner of romance. We visited the mines and the railroads
and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who
remembered Davis. He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had
overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on
sure footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead.
Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had marked
his grave.

CHAPTER XIX

VERA CRUZ AND THE GREAT WAR

Late in April, 1914, when war between the United States and Mexico
seemed inevitable Richard once more left the peace and content of
Crossroads and started for Vera Cruz, arriving there on April 29. He
had arranged to act as correspondent for a syndicate of newspapers, and
as he had for long been opposed to the administration's policy of
"watchful waiting" was greatly disappointed on his arrival at the
border to learn of the President's plan of mediation. He wrote to his
wife:

CRUZ, April 24, 1914.

DEAREST ONE:

We left today at 5.30. It was a splendid scene, except for the
children crying, and the wives of the officers and enlisted men try