have been in politics there, you know. But, even so—I have played chess against its president with a set carved from the nasal bones of the tapir—one of our native specimens of the order of perissodactyle ungulates inhabiting the Cordilleras—which was as pretty ivory as you would care to see.
“But it was of romance and adventure and the ways of woman that I was going to tell you, and not of zoological animals.
“For fifteen years I was the ruling power behind old Sancho Benavides, the Royal High Thumbscrew of the republic. You’ve seen his picture in the papers—a mushy black man with whiskers like the notes on a Swiss music-box cylinder, and a scroll in his right hand like the ones they write births on in the family Bible. Well, that chocolate potentate used to be the biggest item of interest anywhere between the colour line and the parallels of latitude. It was three throws, horses, whether he was to wind up in the Hall of Fame or the Bureau of Combustibles. He’d have been sure called the Roosevelt of the Southern Continent if it had n’t been that Grover Cleveland was President at the time. He’d hold office a couple of terms, then he’d sit out for a hand—always after appointing his own successor for the interims.
“But it was not Benavides, the Liberator, who was making all this fame for himself. Not him. It was Judson Tate. Benavides was only the chip over the bug. I gave him the tip when to declare war and increase import duties and wear his state trousers. But that was n’t what I wanted to tell you. How did I get to be It? I’ll tell
