arm had been cut off at Somo Sierra; swear it with a great deal of
asseveration, making one see the Polish lancers charging the gunners,
being cut down, and his own sword arm falling suddenly.

Carlos, however, used to declare with affectionate cynicism that the
arm had been broken by the cudgel of a Polish peasant while Castro was
trying to filch a pig from a stable.... "I cut his throat out, though,"
Castro would grumble darkly; "so, like that, and it matters very
little--it is even an improvement. See, I put on my blade. See, I
transfix you that fly there.... See how astonished he was. He did never
expect that." He had actually impaled a crawling cockroach. He spent
his days cooking extraordinary messes, crouching for hours over a little
charcoal brazier that he lit surreptitiously in the back of his bunk,
making substitutes for eternal _gaspachos_.

All these things, if they deepened the romance of Carlos' career,
enhanced, also, the mystery. I asked him one day, "But why do you go to
Jamaica at all if you are bound for Cuba?"

He looked at me, smiling a little mournfully.

"Ah, Juan mio," he said, "Spain is not like your England, unchanging and
stable. The party who reign to-day do not love me, and they are masters
in Cuba as in Spain. But in his province my uncle rules alone. There I
shall be safe." He was condescending to roll some cigarettes for Tomas,
whose wooden hand incommoded him, and he tossed a fragment of tobacco to
the wind with a laugh. "In Jamaica there is a merchant, a Señor Ramon; I
have letters to him, and he shall find me a conveyance to Rio Medio, my
uncle's town. He is an _quliado_."