ou you'd be waiting,' he says. 'Where's the Hamburger
machine?'

"'It stays behind,' I says, 'to play "Home, Sweet Home."'

"'I told you so,' says the captain again. 'Climb in the boat.'

"And that," said Keogh, "is the way me and Henry Horsecollar
introduced the phonograph into this country. Henry went back to the
States, but I've been rummaging around in the tropics ever since.
They say Mellinger never travelled a mile after that without his
phonograph. I guess it kept him reminded about his graft whenever he
saw the siren voice of the boodler tip him the wink with a bribe in
its hand."

"I suppose he's taking it home with him as a souvenir," remarked the
consul.

"Not as a souvenir," said Keogh. "He'll need two of 'em in New York,
running day and night."

VII

MONEY MAZE

The new administration of Anchuria entered upon its duties and
privileges with enthusiasm. Its first act was to send an agent to
Coralio with imperative orders to recover, if possible, the sum of
money ravished from the treasury by the ill-fated Miraflores.

Colonel Emilio Falcon, the private secretary of Losada, the new
president, was despatched from the capital upon this important
mission.

The position of private secretary to a tropical president is a
responsible one. He must be a diplomat, a spy, a ruler of men, a
body-guard to his chief, and a smeller-out of plots and nascent
revolutions. Often he is the power behind the throne, the dictator of
policy; and a president chooses him with a dozen times the care with
which he selects a matrimonial mate.

Colonel Falcon, a handsome and urbane gentleman of Castilian courtesy
and debonnaire manners, came to Coralio with the task before him of
striking upon the cold trail of the lost money. There he conferred
with the military authorities, who had received instructions to
co-operate with him in the search.

Colonel Falcon established his headquarters in one of the rooms of
the Casa Morena. Here for a week he held informal sittings--much as
if he were a kind of unified grand jury--and summoned before him all
those whose testimony might illumine the financial tragedy that had
accompanied the less momentous one of the late president's death.

Two or three who were thus examined, among whom was the barber
Esteban, declared that they had identified the body of the president
before its burial.

"Of a truth," testified Esteban before the mighty secretary, "it was
he, the president.