I had become acquainted with the two boys through Mr. Raymond, whom I had met in Cuba during those stirring war times, which I have tried to depict to the best of my ability in another volume called, "When Santiago Fell." I had had adventures between the Cuban and Spanish lines galore, and when I was captured and placed in a Santiago dungeon, Oliver's father was my cell companion. How we finally escaped has already been related.
My father and I lived in the East, but upon Mr. Raymond's kind invitation we had come on to San Francisco, and here I had first met Oliver and Dan, and the three of us soon became warm friends. They never got done telling of their adventures in the Philippines, nor I of my adventures in Cuba, where I had left an old school chum, a Cuban youth named Alano Guerez. Alano was still at home, trying to do what he could, now the war was over, for his parents on their extensive sugar-cane plantation.
The trip West by my father and myself had been productive of more than friendly relations. My father had been looking for a good business opening to work in connection with what he already possessed in New York and in Santiago and Havana, Cuba. Mr. Smith, of the firm of Raymond, Holbrook & Smith, wished to retire, and now my father was a member of the new firm of
