plained to his wife that he came
home because the other places were shut.

But, because, formerly in Valencia I had held a minor post in our
legation, and because the State Department so constantly consults our
firm on questions of international law, it was believed I revisited
Valencia on some mysterious and secret mission.

As a matter of fact, had I gone there to sell phonographs or to start a
steam laundry, I should have been as greatly suspected. For in Valencia
even every commercial salesman, from the moment he gives up his passport
on the steamer until the police permit him to depart, is suspected,
shadowed, and begirt with spies.

I believe that during my brief visit I enjoyed the distinction
of occupying the undivided attention of three: a common or garden
Government spy, from whom no guilty man escapes, a Walker-Keefe spy,
and the spy of the Nitrate Company. The spy of the Nitrate Company is
generally a man you meet at the legations and clubs. He plays bridge
and is dignified with the title of "agent." The Walker-Keefe spy is
ostensibly a travelling salesman or hotel runner. The Government spy is
just a spy--a scowling, important little beast in a white duck suit and
a diamond ring. The limit of his intelligence is to follow you into a
cigar store and note what cigar you buy, and in what kind of money you
pay for it.

The reason for it all was the three-cornered fight which then was being
waged by the Government, the Nitrate Trust, and the Walker-Keefe crowd
for the possession of the nitrate beds. Valencia is so near to the
equator, and so far from New York, that there are few who studied the
intricate story of that disgraceful struggle, which, I hasten to add,
with the fear of libel before my eyes, I do not intend to tell now.

Briefly, it was a triangular fight between opponents each of whom was in
the wrong, and each of whom, to gain his end, bribed, blackmailed, and
robbed, not only his adversaries, but those of his own side, the end in
view being the possession of those great deposits that lie in the
rocks of Valencia, baked from above by the tropic sun and from below by
volcanic fires. As one of their engineers, one night in the Plaza, said
to me: "Those mines were conceived in hell, and stink to heaven, and
the reputation of every man of us that has touched them smells like the
mines."

At the time I was there the situation was "acute." In Valencia the
situation always is acute, but this time it