y takes to drink
either just before or just after it happens.

"From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a
tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the
Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a
little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the
ship had run against that name in the dark!

"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,' says High
Jack Snakefeeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory
when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.

"'We will find ruins here or make 'em,' says High. 'The Government
doesn't care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation.'

"Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town. Them biblical towns we read
about--Tired and Siphon--after they was destroyed, they must have
looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca
place. It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved
on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens
were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of 'em was
light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up
on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server
couldn't have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers. We
wondered what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found
out that it was Major Bing.

"Major Bing was the ointment around the fly. He had the cochineal,
sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and
pure food adulteration concessions cornered. He had five-sixths of
the Boca de Thingama-jiggers working for him on shares. It was a
beautiful graft. We used to brag about Morgan and E. H. and others
of our wisest when I was in the provinces--but now no more. That
peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without
even the observation tower showing.

"Major Bing's idea was this. He had the population go forth into the
forest and gather these products. When they brought 'em in he gave
'em one-fifth for their trouble. Sometimes they'd strike and demand a
sixth. The Major always gave in to 'em.

"The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch
tide seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor. Me and him and
High Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till
midnight. He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and
High and me could stay with him forever if