Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/373

 left of Ganley's coup d'état. And Ganley himself? He knew that Ulloa was still patrolling the coast to cut off Ganley's escape. He wondered, with a strange sense of detachment, just where between the blue peaks of the Cordilleras and the Caribbean's pulsing surf-line that man of destiny was skulking and hiding. He wondered where under that unpitying and high-arching tropical sky the lonely fugitive was still scheming and plotting and battling for his ultimate prerogative, for his mortal right to live.

Yes, it was all over and done, McKinnon told himself, wearily, as a comprehension of the solitudes that enisled him began to creep like a slowly rising tide through every fibre of his being. They meant nothing to him, these outlandish soldiers in ragged uniform, this sun-baked city among its lonely hills, these denim-clad peons with long-bladed machetes, these red-tiled homes of a people who were foreign to him, this over-gaudy Latin palace with its second-rate statuary and its gilding and mirrors that would be an affront to a Hudson River steamboat's cabin. It was a land of strangers to him. He suddenly knew that he was home sick for the North.

He was possessed with a longing for the older and more austere ways of life, for more tranquil and muffled and orderly days, for the