and smoking cigar or cigarette. Looking
down on the dimly lighted ways one seemed to see a threading maze
of brunette ghosts tangled with a procession of insane fireflies.
In some houses the thrumming of lugubrious guitars added to the
depression of the _triste_ night. Giant tree-frogs rattled in the
foliage as loudly as the end man's "bones" in a minstrel troupe. By
nine o'clock the streets were almost deserted.

Nor at the consulate was there often a change of bill. Keogh would
come there nightly, for Coralio's one cool place was the little
seaward porch of that official residence.

The brandy would be kept moving; and before midnight sentiment would
begin to stir in the heart of the self-exiled consul. Then he would
relate to Keogh the story of his ended romance. Each night Keogh
would listen patiently to the tale, and be ready with untiring
sympathy.

"But don't you think for a minute"--thus Johnny would always conclude
his woeful narrative--"that I'm grieving about that girl, Billy. I've
forgotten her. She never enters my mind. If she were to enter that
door right now, my pulse wouldn't gain a beat. That's all over long
ago."

"Don't I know it?" Keogh would answer. "Of course you've forgotten
her. Proper thing to do. Wasn't quite O. K. of her to listen to the
knocks that--er--Dink Pawson kept giving you."

"Pink Dawson!"--a world of contempt would be in Johnny's tones--"Poor
white trash! That's what he was. Had five hundred acres of farming
land, though; and that counted. Maybe I'll have a chance to get back
at him some day. The Dawsons weren't anybody. Everybody in Alabama
knows the Atwoods. Say, Billy--did you know my mother was a De
Graffenreid?"

"Why, no," Keogh would say; "is that so?" He had heard it some three
hundred times.

"Fact. The De Graffenreids of Hancock County. But I never think of
that girl any more, do I, Billy?"

"Not for a minute, my boy," would be the last sounds heard by the
conqueror of Cupid.

At this point Johnny would fall into a gentle slumber, and Keogh
would saunter out to his own shack under the calabash tree at the
edge of the plaza.

In a day or two the letter from the Dalesburg postmaster and its
answer had been forgotten by the Coralio exiles. But on the 26th day
of July the fruit of the reply appeared upon the tree of events.

The _Andador_, a fruit steamer that visited Coralio regularly, drew
into the offing and anchored. The beach was lined with spectators
wh