a place of honor. The boat
touched the pier. A small man in civilian dress walked smartly to the
land. He had a riding-whip in his hand,--symbol of his rule: for this
was Tacon, and within a month he was to whip crime into its dens and
make the capital of Cuba safe. His first order carried consternation
to the advocates of fuss and feathers. It was to dismiss the parade,
remove the decorations, send the police to their posts, and declare
Havana in a state of siege. This was startling, but it gratified
and assured those who had long begged for an honest and watchful
government, and had continued not to get it. Crime recognized and
feared this master. "In a little while," says a Cuban, "you could
have gone about the streets at any hour of the night with diamonds
in your open hands and nobody would have touched you, not even the
Spanish Robert Macaire or Robin Hood, who is remembered bitterly in
Andalusia,--Diego Corrientes." Merchants going to and from the bank
with money had formerly been compelled to hire soldiers as guards,
and when they complained of violence the magistrates had said, "Go to
bed at seven, as we do, and you'll have no trouble." Thieves bought
their liberty from jailers. Tacon arrested the jailers in that case.

It does not take long to erect a reputation when it has a basis of
desert. An odd modern instance is told in the case of an American
newspaper reporter, John C. Klein, who, after ten years of absence,
was canonized by the Samoans, among whom he had lived for some years,
as a hero in battle, a slayer of Germans, and a wizard who closed
his own wounds by magic. The gods approved him, and the people in
their trouble prayed for the return of Talaini o le Meleke (Klein,
the American) to rescue them. And with Tacon it took hardly longer to
become a sort of national hero. The qualities he showed in reforming,
building, extending, and protecting Havana were so unusual that the
people willingly credited others to him he may not have possessed. He
has become legendary already.

Tacon, after gathering in two thousand of the riff-raff and putting
them at work on roads, piers, and prisons, applied himself with
special energy to the suppression of Marti, the most daring, yet the
slyest and most cautious of all the robbers in the country. He and
his band thought no more of splitting the weasand of a soldier than
tossing off a glass of brandy, and the people were more than half
his friends, because he joined