But Horace
Smithson was not free. He was bound hand and foot by those fetters which
the chain of past events had forged--stern facts which the man himself
may forget, or try to forget, but which other people never forget. There
is generally some dark spot in the history of such men as Smithson--men
who climb the giddiest heights of this world with that desperate
rapidity which implies many a perilous leap from crag to crag, many a
moraine skimmed over, and many an awful gulf spanned by a hair-breadth
bridge. Mr. Smithson's history was not without such spots; and the
darkest of all had relation to his career in Cuba. The story had been
known by very few--perhaps completely known only by one man; and that
man was Gomez de Montesma.
For the last fifteen years the most fervent desire of Horace Smithson's
heart had been the hope that tropical nature, in any one of her various
disagreeable forms, would be obliging enough to make an end of Gomez.
But the forces of nature had not worked on Mr. Smithson's side. No
loathsome leprosy had eaten his enemy's flesh; neither cayman nor
crocodile, neither Juba snake nor poisonous spider had marked him for
its prey.
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