I'll eat the price-tag in my Panama. It was me
that they hung out paper flowers and palm branches for. I am not a
jealous man; I am stating facts. The people were Nebuchadnezzars;
they bit the grass before me; there was no dust in the town for them
to bite. They bowed down to Judson Tate. They knew that I was the
power behind Sancho Benavides. A word from me was more to them than
a whole deckle-edged library from East Aurora in sectional bookcases
was from anybody else. And yet there are people who spend hours
fixing their faces--rubbing in cold cream and massaging the muscles
(always toward the eyes) and taking in the slack with tincture of
benzoin and electrolyzing moles--to what end? Looking handsome.
Oh, what a mistake! It's the larynx that the beauty doctors ought
to work on. It's words more than warts, talk more than talcum,
palaver more than powder, blarney more than bloom that counts--the
phonograph instead of the photograph. But I was going to tell you.

"The local Astors put me and Fergus up at the Centipede Club, a
frame building built on posts sunk in the surf. The tide's only nine
inches. The Little Big High Low Jack-in-the-game of the town came
around and kowtowed. Oh, it wasn't to Herr Mees. They had heard
about Judson Tate.

"One afternoon me and Fergus McMahan was sitting on the seaward
gallery of the Centipede, drinking iced rum and talking.

"'Judson,' says Fergus, 'there's an angel in Oratama.'

"'So long,' says I, 'as it ain't Gabriel, why talk as if you had
heard a trump blow?'

"'It's the Senorita Anabela Zamora,' says Fergus.
'She's--she's--she's as lovely as--as hell!'

"'Bravo!' says I, laughing heartily. 'You have a true lover's
eloquence to paint the beauties of your inamorata. You remind me,'
says I, 'of Faust's wooing of Marguerite--that is, if he wooed her
after he went down the trap-door of the stage.'

"'Judson,' says Fergus, 'you know you are as beautiless as a
rhinoceros. You can't have any interest in women. I'm awfully gone
in Miss Anabela. And that's why I'm telling you.'

"'Oh, _seguramente_,' says I. 'I know I have a front elevation like
an Aztec god that guards a buried treasure that never did exist
in Jefferson County, Yucatan. But there are compensations. For
instance, I am It in this country as far as the eye can reach, and
then a few perches and poles. And again,' says I, 'when I engage
people in a set-to of oral, vocal, and laryngeal utterances, I do
not usually c