Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/114

 "Do you mean Duran the president?"

"Yes; but that was before he had been made president. Indeed, when Duran first actively entered Locombian politics he persuaded my brother to join him. I was at school then, in France—but I know that when their party came into power my brother found himself in Duran's cabinet, as minister of war."

"And you are going down there to face all this?" McKinnon asked, with a vaguely comprehensive wave of the arm.

The woman said "Yes." She looked, for all her inalienable aura of vitality, very slender, and unsuited to the ways of war, above all things, to the ways of Latin-American guerilla war.

"But that seems as brutal, as unthinkable, as a girl going into a ring with two prize-fighters," he tried to explain to her.

"Yes, I know; but I'm not going into the ring," she answered. "All I can do is hover about the outside edges of it, and do what I can when I know there is underhand work, when there is foul play like this going on."

"Foul play like what?"

"Like this!" she averred, tapping the deck with her shoe-heel.

"Do you mean the Laminian? Or do you