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 you know, will make a log as high as your table crumble away in one season. So the government brought in a shipload of street-car rails, I think they were second-hand rails from Kingston, and planted them for poles to carry the line up to Guariqui. But the natives kept cutting out sections of the wire for their own use, to mend saddle-girths and tie up hut-wattles, and it took three-quarters of Arturo's government troops to patrol the route and keep the line open. So they gave it up, at last, and fitted up the three wireless stations."

She did not join in McKinnon's laugh over the untimely end of Locombia's telegraph-system.

"Where is the third station—the one besides Guariqui and Puerto Locombial?" he asked.

"At Boracao—that's the biggest of the banana-shipping towns."

"It's hard to have to sit and wait for—for the inevitable this way," he said, with an assumption of cheeriness.

"Yes, it is hard," she said, out of the silence that once more fell over them.

He felt, none the less, wordlessly grateful for her presence there, talking or silent. She seemed to bring a new and more vital atmosphere into his squalid little station. She seemed to throw a warm and transforming tint on