fire to his tobacco houses when they found he had been forewarned and escaped them. [Pg 34] "I cannot repeat to you all the vile abuses they heaped upon me," she added, quietly. "One of them, a mulatto who had been discharged by my father, tried to kiss me. He is dead now." She shuddered with the recollection. The Baltimore family shuddered at her matter-of-fact recital. "You mean—that he"——stammered placid, domestic Mrs. Franklin. "I mean that two of my father's men singled him out and macheted him the first time they met in a skirmish." On only one point was she reticent. Her father, she said, had come to this country on an errand for the rebels, but what that errand was she did not explain. "He is General Moreto now," she remarked; "and if ever Senor Zayas becomes President and our party comes into control at Havana, they have promised my father greater honors." For a week Senorita Moreto continued to add to the powerful interest she had aroused in her hosts. By day they tried to entertain her—an afternoon at Notre Dame with the school Sisters, a trip through the rebuilt fire district, a ride to Bay Shore Park, an excursion to Port Deposit by steamboat and other summer opportunities. But of an evening, when the family was all collected in the library or on the front stoop, the Cuban dispatches in that day's News were carefully gone over and afforded texts upon which Manuela vivaciously and eloquently inveighed against the despotism[Pg 35] of the "ins" and predicted the triumph of the "outs." [Pg 35] "Upon my soul, Miss Moreto," said the usually level-headed Captain Franklin, "your zeal stirs me so that I find myself wishing every moment I was fighting on your side." "I'd love to have you aid us," murmured the Cuban girl. And she lifted her black eyelashes and cast her brilliant eyes at Catherine's father with such intentness that he was confused and looked away without asking her, as he had intended, just how it was possible for him to help the cause. The next morning Will, who had become the devoted admirer of the pretty Cuban, carried two telegrams for General Moreto when he left home to go to the Hopkins-place wholesale house where he was a clerk. One was addressed to the Raleigh in Washington, the other to the Cuban junta headquarters in New York. Each read:
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