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Keating had been taking breakfast in the ward-room of H. M. S. Indefatigable. As an acquaintance the officers had not found him an undoubted acquisition, but he was the representative of seven hundred papers, and when the Indefatigable’s ice-machine broke, he had loaned the officers’ mess a hundred pounds of it from his own boat.

The cruiser’s gig carried Keating to the wharf, the crew tossed their oars and the boatswain touched his cap and asked, mechanically, “Shall I return to the ship, sir?”

Channing, stretched on the beach, with his back to a palm-tree, observed the approach of Keating with cheerful approbation.

“It is gratifying to me,” he said, “to see the press treated with such consideration. You came in just like Cleopatra in her barge. If the flag had been flying, and you hadn’t steered so badly, I should have thought you were at least an admiral. How many guns does the British Navy give a Consolidated Press reporter when he comes over the side?”

Keating dropped to the sand and, crossing his legs under him, began tossing shells at the water.

“They gave this one a damned good breakfast,” he said, “and some very excellent white wine. Of course, the ice-machine was broken, it always is, but then Chablis never should be iced, if it’s the real thing.”

“Chablis! Ice! Hah!” snorted Channing. “Listen to him! Do you know what I had for breakfast?”

Keating turned away uncomfortably and looked toward the ships in the harbor.

“Well, never mind,” said Channing, yawning luxuriously. “The sun is bright, the sea is blue, and the confidences of this old palm are soothing. He’s a great old gossip, this palm.” He looked up into the rustling fronds and smiled. “He whispers me to sleep,” he went on, “or he talks me awake–talks about all sorts of things–things he has seen–cyclones, wrecks, and strange ships and Cuban refugees and Spanish spies and lovers that meet here on moonlight nights. It’s always moonlight in Port Antonio, isn’t it?”

“You ought to know, you’ve been here longer than I,” said Keating.

“And how do you like it, now that you have got to know it better? Pretty heavenly? eh?”

“Pretty heavenly!” snorted Keating. “Pretty much the other place! What good am I doing? What’s the sense of keeping me here? Cervera isn’t going to come out, and the people at Washington won’t let Sampson go in. Why, those ships have been there a month now, and they’ll be there just where they are now when you and I are bald. I’m no use here. All I do is to thrash across there every day and eat up more coal than the whole squadron burns in a month. Why, that tug of mine’s costing the C. P. six hundred dollars a day, and I’m not sending them news enough to pay for setting it up. Have you seen ’em yet?”

“Seen what? Your stories?”

“No, the ships!”

“Yes, Scudder took me across once in the Iduna. I haven’t got a paper yet, so I couldn’t write anything, but–“

“Well, you’ve seen all there is to it, then; you wouldn’t see any more if you went over every day. It’s just the same old harbor-mouth, and the same old Morro Castle, and same old ships, drifting up and down; the Brooklyn, full of smoke-stacks, and the New York, with her two bridges, and all the rest of them looking just as they’ve looked for the last four weeks. There’s nothing in that. Why don’t they send me to Tampa with the army and Shafter–that’s where the story is.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Channing, shaking his head. “I thought it was bully!”

“Bully, what was bully?”

“Oh, the picture,” said Channing, doubtfully, “and–and what it meant. What struck me about it was that it was so hot, and lazy, and peaceful, that they seemed to be just drifting about, just what you complain of. I don’t know what I expected to see; I think I expected they’d be racing around in circles, tearing up the water and throwing broadsides at Morro Castle as fast as fire-crackers.