Their bags, put off, the rapid incomprehensible speech of the guard,
left them, with the train moving doubtfully on, at Cobra. It was, on
examination, more dismal than, from the detachment of the compartment,
they had realized. The usual baked ground, the dusty underbrush, the
blank fa?ades of the low buildings that faced them from either side of
the tracks, had--in addition to a supreme ugliness--an indefinably
threatening air. The rawness, the machetes hanging about the booted
heels of soiled idlers, the presence everywhere of negroes with an
unrestrained curiosity in Lee and his companion, filled him with an
instinctive antagonism. "Do you think that can be the hotel?" he asked,
indicating a long plaster building with a shallow upper porch supported
on iron-footed wooden columns. Above its closely-shuttered windows, in
letters faded and blistered by the sun, reached the description, "Hotel
de Cobra."
"We can't stay there," he continued decidedly; "I'll send for Daniel at
once."
Without available help he carried their bags to the entrance of the
hotel, and went into a darkened room with a cement floor which had the
thick dampness of an interior saturated with spilled acid wine. There
he found a man, not different from those outside, who, incapable of
understanding English, managed to grasp the fact that Lee wished to see
Daniel Randon immediately.
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