The Yellow Moth
BEING AN ADVENTURE OF DRENTON DENN, SPECIAL COMMISSIONER
Published in: The Daily Mail, London, 11 August 1898
The Clarence and Richmond Examiner, Grafton, N.S.W., Australia, 27 Sep 1898
I
DRENTON DENN stood watching the points of flame dragging along the Cuban coast. Under the cloak of the night rottenness and corruption lay hidden. The cat was still playing with the mouse, and concrete humanity had grown jaded with the spectacle. The whole thing had mattered little to Europe so long as wheat was down firm at 40s. again.
But it mattered a great deal to Drenton Denn, seeing that he was a war correspondent of mark. Copy lay yonder back beyond the sandhills, facing Port Indigo--copy palpitating with new horrors and sensations. Slowly the Spaniards were being starved into submission, chaos and worse reigned in Port Indigo, and Denn meant to sketch the crimson horrors of it on his note-book, despite the rigid regulations forbidding the landing of a single man from the American fleet there.
For strange stories had come like fugitives across the bay to the blockading fleet. The infamous Don Macdona had made his headquarters in Port Indigo. He was holding high court there with the scum of the island. Sooner or later this hybrid tyrant and bloodsucker would fall into the hands of Uncle Sam, and be shot out of hand. Being a fatalist and a sybarite, he was plucking the flowers that time allowed to him.
Carpe diem. This picturesque polyglot reeked in the nostrils of a continent. Of al