ou a letter. Do you fancy I had nothing to do with either of
those events?"

And Riatt found himself answering almost in the word of Cyrano:

"_Non, non, mon cher amour, je ne vous aimais pas_."

The days that followed were the happiest that Riatt had ever known. Only
those who have lived in a brief and agreeable present can understand the
fullness of joy that he was able to extract from it. If he had been
under sentence of death he could not have given less thought to the
future. He gave himself up wholly to the two excitements of making love
and losing money.

At first he prospered more at the former than the latter. For at first,
for some time after he had acquired the stock of the mine, the reports
from it grew more and more favorable and old friends came to him and
begged him to allow them to take up a little of it. His curt refusal to
all such propositions increased the impression that he knew he had a very
good thing and meant to keep it all for himself.

But he did not have very long to wait for the turn of the tide. Within a
few weeks he received a letter from Welsley, alarming only because its
intention was so obviously to allay alarm. It appeared that a liberal
revolution was threatened; the concession from the government then in
power would not bear the scrutiny of an impartial witness such as our own
State Department. If, in other words, the present government fell, the
concession would fall, too.

"However," Welsley wrote cheerfully, "though the revolution has the
support of the uneducated element of the population, which comprises most
of the people, as they have neither arms, ammunition nor money, they
can't do much, unless some fool in the north is induced to finance them.
You could help us a lot by looking about and seeing if there is any
danger of such a thing."

On receipt of this, Riatt instantly telegraphed to Welsley as follows:

"Count upon me. What is the name and address of the revolutionary
agent here?"

The next day in a back bedroom of a down-town hotel, $10,000 changed
hands between a slight, dark, very finished gentleman who spoke English
with the slightest possible accent, and a tall, fine-looking young
American whose name never appeared in the transaction. Within a month a
shipment of arms had been smuggled into a certain South American country,
with the result that the revolution was completely successful--as indeed
it deserved to be. One of the first acts of the new governm