Parlous Times

The sun had sunk red and fiery below the edge of the waving mesa, and a full tropical moon shed its glory over the landscape, making dark and mysterious the waving fields of cane, which surrounded the whitewashed courts of the palatial hacienda. The building was brilliantly lighted within, and from it came such sounds of discordant merriment as could be produced only by a singularly inferior native orchestra. His meditations were not, however, destined to remain uninterrupted. He had gone scarcely thirty yards when a lithe figure rose suddenly out of a clump of bushes, and touching him softly on the arm, whispered in perfect English, without the faintest touch of Spanish accent