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The captain nodded to the crew and they closed in on him, and bore him, struggling feebly, to a bunk in the cabin below. In the berth opposite, Keating was snoring peacefully.

After the six weeks’ siege the Fruit Company’s doctor told Channing he was cured, and that he might walk abroad. In this first walk he found that, during his illness, Port Antonio had reverted to her original condition of complete isolation from the world, the press- boats had left her wharves, the correspondents had departed from the veranda of her only hotel, the war was over, and the Peace Commissioners had sailed for Paris. Channing expressed his great gratitude to the people of the hotel and to the Fruit Company’s doctor. He made it clear to them that if they ever hoped to be paid those lesser debts than that of gratitude which he still owed them, they must return him to New York and Newspaper Row. It was either that, he said, or, if they preferred, he would remain and work out his indebtedness, checking bunches of bananas at twenty dollars a month. The Fruit Company decided it would be paid more quickly if Channing worked at his own trade, and accordingly sent him North in one of its steamers. She landed him in Boston, and he borrowed five dollars from the chief engineer to pay his way to New York.

It was late in the evening of the same day when he stepped out of the smoking-car into the roar and riot of the Grand Central Station. He had no baggage to detain him, and, as he had no money either, he made his way to an Italian restaurant where he knew they would trust him to pay later for what he ate. It was a place where the newspaper men were accustomed to meet, men who knew him, and who, until he found work, would lend him money to buy a bath, clean clothes, and a hall bedroom.

Norris, the World man, greeted him as he entered the door of the restaurant, and hailed him with a cry of mingled fright and pleasure.

“Why, we didn’t know but you were dead,” he exclaimed. “The boys said when they left Kingston you weren’t expected to live. Did you ever get the money and things we sent you by the Red Cross boat?”

Channing glanced at himself and laughed.

“Do I look it?” he asked. He was wearing the same clothes in which he had slept under the fruit-sheds at Port Antonio. They had been soaked and stained by the night-dews and by the sweat of the fever.

“Well, it’s great luck, your turning up here just now,” Norris assured him, heartily. “That is, if you’re as hungry as the rest of the boys are who have had the fever. You struck it just right; we’re giving a big dinner here to-night,” he explained, “one of Maria’s best. You come in with me. It’s a celebration for old Keating, a farewell blow-out.”

Channing started and laughed.

“Keating?” he asked. “That’s funny,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since–since before I was ill.”

“Yes, old Jimmie Keating. You’ve got nothing against him, have you?”

Channing shook his head vehemently, and Norris glanced back complacently toward the door of the dining-room, from whence came the sound of intimate revelry.

“You might have had, once,” Norris said, laughing; “we were all up against him once. But since he’s turned out such a wonder and a war- hero, we’re going to recognize it. They’re always saying we newspaper men have it in for each other, and so we’re just giving him this subscription-dinner to show it’s not so. He’s going abroad, you know. He sails to-morrow morning.”

“No, I didn’t know,” said Channing.

“Of course not, how could you? Well, the Consolidated Press’s sending him and his wife to Paris. He’s to cover the Peace negotiations there. It’s really a honeymoon-trip at the expense of the C. P. It’s their reward for his work, for his Santiago story, and the beat and all that–“