"Joseph Fiske is fighting in a Hondurian revolution?" I exclaimed.

"Certainly not!" cried Aiken. "He's here on a pleasure trip; partly
pleasure, partly business. He came here on his yacht. You can see her
from the window, lying to the left of the buoy. Fiske has nothing to
do with this row. I don't suppose he knows there's a revolution going
on."

I resented this pretended lack of interest on the part of the Wall
Street banker. I condemned it as a piece of absurd affectation.

"Don't you believe it!" I said. "No matter how many millions a man
has, he doesn't stand to lose $500,000 without taking an interest in
it."

"Oh, but he doesn't know about _that_," said Aiken. "He doesn't know
the ins and outs of the story--what I've been telling you. That's on
the inside--that's cafe scandal. That side of it would never reach
him. I suppose Joe Fiske is president of a _dozen_ steamship lines,
and all he does is to lend his name to this one, and preside at board
meetings. The company's lawyers tell him whatever they think he ought
to know. They probably say they're having trouble down here owing to
one of the local revolutions, and that Garcia is trying to blackmail
them."

"Then you don't think Fiske came down here about this?" I asked.

"About this?" repeated Aiken, in a tone of such contempt that I
disliked him intensely. For the last half hour Aiken had been jumping