"'Anybody ever killed?'
"'Oh, not more than maybe a few hundred to a time--sometimes a few
thousand--'
"'Hundreds? Thousands?' says Cogan. 'We hadn't any more than three
hundred killed--that is, killed fighting--in the whole Santiago
campaign.' Cogan had been there.
"'And you have written a library of books about it,' says Martin. 'But
of course when a few hundred are killed down this way--'tis a great
joke. And those little black and tan lads of thirteen or fourteen having
to go off shouldering a rifle and kill or get killed--they're jokes,
too. But if a grown man up in your country does it--the band plays when
he goes and comes, and he makes speeches about it at banquets--and
sometimes he will draw a pension for the next sixty years after it--'
says Martin and said it in his easy way, as if he didn't care much about
it one way or the other; and maybe he didn't.
"Cogan didn't find much doing on the streets of Colon after the
Revolution was over, so he got in the way of dropping into a place just
around the corner from Martin's, a joint where they sold you drinks to
tables in the front room and ran faro layouts in two rooms in back--one
for whites and one for blacks.
"Cogan drifted in there with a man who looked like the pictures of grand
dukes he'd seen--tall, fine broad shoulders, and dressed in white ducks,
and wore a long, well-trimmed dark beard, and swung a gold-headed cane,
and had a big ring on one finger.
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