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“Not so darned bad!” cried Carlyle excitedly.”I guess that little coon knows his way round this corner of the Atlantic.”

His exuberance was contagious, and Ardita became quite jubilant.

“It’s an absolutely sure-fire hiding-place!”

“Lordy, yes! It’s the sort of island you read about.”

The rowboat was lowered into the golden lake and they pulled ashore.

“Come on,” said Carlyle as they landed in the slushy sand, “we’ll go exploring.”

The fringe of palms was in turn ringed in by a round mile of flat, sandy country. They followed it south and brushing through a farther rim of tropical vegetation came out on a pearl-gray virgin beach where Ardita kicked off her brown golf shoes—she seemed to have permanently abandoned stockings—and went wading. Then they sauntered back to the yacht, where the indefatigable Babe had luncheon ready for them. He had posted a lookout on the high cliff to the north to watch the sea on both sides, though he doubted if the entrance to the cliff was generally known—he had never even seen a map
on which the island was marked.

“What’s its name,” asked Ardita—”the island, I mean?”

“No name ‘tall,” chuckled Babe.”Reckin she jus’ island, ‘at’s all.”

In the late afternoon they sat with their backs against great boulders on the highest part of the cliff and Carlyle sketched for her his vague plans. He was sure they were hot after him by this time. The total proceeds of the coup he had pulled off, and concerning which he still refused to enlighten her, he estimated as just under a million dollars. He counted on lying up here several weeks and then setting off southward, keeping well outside the usual channels of travel, rounding the Horn and heading for Callao, in Peru. The details of coaling and provisioning he was leaving entirely to Babe, who, it seemed, had sailed these seas in every capacity from cabin-boy aboard a coffee trader to virtual first mate on a Brazilian pirate craft, whose skipper had long since been hung.

“If he’d been white he’d have been king of South America long ago,” said Carlyle emphatically.”When it comes to intelligence he makes Booker T. Washington look like a moron. He’s got the guile of every race and nationality whose blood is in his veins, and that’s half a dozen or I’m a liar. He worships me because I’m the only man in the world who can play better ragtime than he can. We used to sit together on the wharfs down on the New York water-front, he with a bassoon and me with an oboe, and we’d blend minor keys in African harmonics a thousand years old until the rats would crawl up the posts and sit round groaning and squeaking like dogs will in front of a phonograph.”

Ardita roared.

“How you can tell ’em!”

Carlyle grinned.

“I swear that’s the gos——”

“What you going to do when you get to Callao?” she interrupted.

“Take ship for India. I want to be a rajah. I mean it. My idea is to go up into Afghanistan somewhere, buy up a palace and a reputation, and then after about five years appear in England with a foreign accent and a mysterious past. But India first. Do you know, they say that all the gold in the world drifts very gradually back to India. Something fascinating about that to me. And I want leisure to read—an immense amount.”

“How about after that?”

“Then,” he answered defiantly, “comes aristocracy. Laugh if you want to—but at least you’ll have to admit that I know what I want—which I imagine is more than you do.”

“On the contrary,” contradicted Ardita, reaching in her pocket for her cigarette case, “when I met you I was in the midst of a great uproar of all my friends and relatives because I did know what I wanted.”