“My health requires that I should recline for a certain number of hours every day,” he explained. “So you will please forgive me.”
“My dear Colonel Menendez,” said Harley, “I feel sure that you are interrupting your siesta in order to discuss the unpleasant business which finds us in such pleasant surroundings. Allow me once again to suggest that we postpone this matter until, shall we say, after dinner?”
“No, no! No, no,” protested the Colonel, waving his hand deprecatingly. “Here is Pedro with coffee and some curaçao of a kind which I can really recommend, although you may be unfamiliar with it.”
I was certainly unfamiliar with the liqueur which he insisted we must taste, and which was contained in a sort of square, opaque bottle unknown, I think, to English wine merchants. Beyond doubt it was potent stuff; and some cigars which the Spaniard produced on this occasion and which were enclosed in little glass cylinders resembling test-tubes and elaborately sealed, I recognized to be priceless. They convinced me, if conviction had not visited me already, that Colonel Don Juan Sarmiento Menendez belonged to that old school of West Indian planters by whom the tradition of the Golden Americas had been for long preserved in the Spanish Main.
We discussed indifferent matters for a while, sipping this wonderful curaçao of our host’s. The effect created by the Colonel’s story faded entirely, and when, the latter being unable to conceal his drowsiness, Harley stood up, I took the hint with gratitude; for at that moment I did not feel in the mood to discuss serious business or indeed business of any kind.
“Gentlemen,” said the Colonel, also rising, in spite
