from Cuba--or from a post-office box in New York--it's all the same
thing, because Cuba being so near to New York the mail is all
distributed from there. I suppose in some financial circles they
might have been slower, wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on,
but these Cubans, you know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of
heart that you don't see in business men in America, and that touches
you. No, they asked no guarantee. Just send the money whether by
express order or by bank draft or cheque, they left that entirely to
oneself, as a matter between Cuban gentlemen.

And they were quite frank about their enterprise--bananas and tobacco
in the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos. You could
see it all there in the pictures--tobacco plants and the
insurrectos--everything. They made no rash promises, just admitted
straight out that the enterprise might realise 400 per cent. or might
conceivably make less. There was no hint of more.

So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was
"in Cuban lands" and would probably clean up half a million by New
Year's. You couldn't have failed to know it. All round the little
shop there were pictures of banana groves and the harbour of Habana,
and Cubans in white suits and scarlet sashes, smoking cigarettes in
the sun and too ignorant to know that you can make four hundred per
cent. by planting a banana tree.

I liked it about Jeff that he didn't stop shaving. He went on just
the same. Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with five
hundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directors
would let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved
him for five cents, in the same old way. Of course, he must have felt