"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.
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