d a deserved
popularity. It was cheerily North American in its viewpoint of the
sub-tropical republics and was very up to date. The outdoor American
girl was not so established at that time, and the Davis report of her
was refreshing. Robert Clay was unconsciously Dick Davis himself as he
would have tried to do--Captain Stuart was the English officer that
Davis had met the world over, or, closer still, he was the better side
of such men which the attractive wholesomeness of Davis would draw out.
Alice and King were the half-spoiled New Yorkers as he knew them at the
dinner-parties.

At a manager's suggestion Dick made a play of the book. It was his
first attempt for the theatre and lacked somewhat the skill that he
developed later in his admirable "Dictator." I was called in by the
manager as an older carpenter and craftsman to make another dramatic
version. Dick and I were already friends and he already liked plays
that I had done, but that alone could not account for the heartiness
with which he turned over to me his material and eliminated himself.
Only his unspoiled simplicity and utter absence of envy could do that.
Only native modesty could explain the absence of the usual author pride
and sensitiveness. The play was immediately successful. It would have
been a dull hack, indeed, who could have spoiled such excellent stage
material as the novel furnished, but his generosity saw genius in the
dramatic extension of the types he had furnished and in the welding of
additions. Even after enthusiasm had had time enough to cool, he sent
me a first copy of the Playgoers' edition of the novel, printed in
1902, with the inscription:

TO AUGUSTUS THOMAS:

Gratefully, Admiringly, Sincerely.

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.

And then, as if feeling the formality of the names, he wrote below:

DEAR GUS,

If you liked this book only one-fifth as much as I like your play, I
would be content to rest on that and spare the public any others. So
for the sake of the public try to like it.

DICK.

In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of the
play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba, where,
twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story and
out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his supposititious
republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company.
With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the
numberless pla