Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/16

 Back in his little room again he read them all, thoroughly, even with eagerness; read the foreign news first, then the native, the scandal, the advertisements—even the editorials.

He found that England had completed her subjugation of the hill tribes, and incidentally the education of her rawest troops. On the horizon no war cloud threatened—unless in one spot.

From a meager paragraph, eked out by his knowledge of Central American politics, O'Rourke gleaned a ray of hope: trouble boded on the Isthmus of Panama. But that was indeed far from Paris.

He put aside his pipe and the last sheet, and glowered longingly across the roofs to the western sky line.

What his eyes rested upon, he saw not; mentally he was imaging to himself, scenting, even feeling the heat haze that lowers above that narrow ribbon of swamp, rock-spined, which lies obdurate between two oceans.

On his businesses of the moment he had crossed the isthmus several times. He had warred in its vicinity. He knew it very well indeed, and were there to be ructions there he desired greatly to be in and a part of them—to grip the hilt of a sword, to hold a horse between his thighs, to sweat and swelter, to toil and to suffer, to fight—above all, to fight—!

Clearly the obvious course of action was to go—to stand not on the order of his going, but to go at once.

O'Rourke started from his chair, with some half-formulated notion of proceeding directly to the Gare du Nord, and taking train for Havre; thence, he would engage passage via the French line to New York, thence, by coasting steamer to Aspinwall.

The route mapped itself plain to his imagination; the way was simple, very; there was but one complication. Realizing