## The Lotus and the Cockleburrs

There are yet tales of the Spanish Main. That grim coast washed by the tempestuous Caribbean, and presenting to the sea a formidable border of tropical jungle topped by the overweening Cordilleras, is still begirt by mystery and romance.

Buccaneers and revolutionists have roused the echoes of its cliffs, and the condor has wheeled perpetually above where, in the dark green jungles, they made food for him with their pikes and cutlasses. Taken and retaken by pirates, by adverse powers, and by sudden uprising of rebellious factions, the old towns along the historic 300 miles of adventurous coast have scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call their master. Pizarro, Balboa, Sir Francis Drake, and Bolivar did what they could to make it a port of Christendom. Sir John Morgan, Lafitte, and other eminent sea-rovers, bombarded and pounded it in the name of Abaddon.

The game still goes on. The tintype man, the enlarged photograph brigand, and the kodaking tourist have found it out. The hucksters of Germany, France, and Syria bag its small change across their counters. The gentleman adventurer throngs the waiting-rooms of its rulers with propositions for railways and concessions. The little, opera bouffe nations play at government and intrigue until some day a big, silent gunboat glides into the offing and warns them not to break their toys. It was in these latter days that Johnny Atwood added his handiwork to the list of casualties along the Spanish Main by his famous manipulation of the shoe market, and his unparalleled feat of elevating that despised and useless weed product, the cockleburr, from its obscurity to be a valuable product in international commerce.

The trouble began, as trouble often begins instead of ending, with a romance. There was a man names Hemstetter, who came to the little Southern town where Johnny lived, to open a general store. His family consisted of one daughter called Rosine, a name that atoned much for “Hemstetter.” This young woman was possessed of sufficient pulchritude to agitate the young men of the community. Johnny, who was among the more violently agitated, was the son of Judge Atwood, who lived in the colonial mansion near the edge of Dalesburg. Being a young man of address and spirit, as well as scion of one of the oldest families in the State, it would seem that the desirable Rosine should have been pleased to return his affection, and be received into the stately but rather empty colonial mansion. But no. There was a cloud on the horizon in the shape of a lively and shrewd young farmer in the neighborhood who dared to enter the lists as a rival to the highborn Atwood.

One night Johnny propounded to Rosine a question that is considered of great importance by the young. The accessories were all there⁠—moonlight, oleanders, magnolias, and the mock-bird’s song. Whether or no the shadow of Pinkney Dawson, the prosperous young farmer, came between them, is not known; but Johnny was declined. Hesitatingly, blushingly, flutteringly, it is true⁠—but declined. Could the blood of an Atwood brook declination? Johnny bowed to the ground and went away with head high, but mortified and bruised in his pedigree and heart. A Hemstetter refuse an Atwood!

Among other accidents of that year was a Democratic President. Judge Atwood was a warhorse of Democracy. Johnny set the wheels moving. He would go away⁠—away! Rosine should never look upon his face again. Perhaps in years to come she would look back with regret upon the pure and faithful love that⁠—etc., etc.

The wheels of politics revolved, and John De Graffenreid Atwood was appointed United States Consul at Vibora. Just before leaving he dropped in at Hemstetter’s to say goodbye. Pink Dawson was there, of course, talking about his 80-acre field, and the 3-mile meadow, and the 200-acre pasture, and the 40-acre hill-tract. Johnny shook hands with Rosine as cooly as if he were only going to run up to Vicksburg for a week.

“If you happen to strike a good thing in the way of an investment down there, Johnny,” said Pink Dawson, “just let me know, will you? I reckon I could rustle up a thousand or two ’most any time for a profitable deal.”

“All right, Pink,” said Johnny, pleasantly. “If I strike anything I’ll let you know, sure.”

So Johnny went to New Orleans, and took a steamer down to his post at Vibora.

Vibora was a town of about 3,000 inhabitants, set in the curve of a little half-moon harbor. It lay on a narrow strip of alluvial deposit hemmed in by morose mountains at its rear, and by the sea in front. The population was Carib, Spanish-Indian half-breeds, and negroes, with a disturbing leaven of the froth and scum of half a dozen other nations. The streets were merely grass-grown spaces between the red-tiled, squatty houses. Through the grass were crisscrossing paths made by the bare feet of the dwellers. Two or three Americans and four or five Germans and French represented the more enlightened races. The sole source of the town’s life and income was the exportation of fruit, a little rubber, and a few of the valuable woods.

John De Graffenreid Atwood, the newly appointed consul, plunged into his work, which was principally to sprawl in a hammock, and to try to forget Rosine Hemstetter. We are to suppose that he has been thus occupied for one year. Then will begin the story of the exploit that made Johnny a hero in commerce, agriculture, and love.

Johnny ate of the lotus, root, stem, and flower. The tropics gobbled him up. They who dine on the lotus rarely consume it plain, as a healthy salad should be eaten. There is a sauce au diable that goes with it, and the distillers are the chefs who prepare it. And on Johnny’s menu card it read brandy and the native red rum. His particular friend in Vibora was Billy Keogh, an American, who was interested in mahogany. The two would sit on the little porch of the consulate at night and roar out great, indecorous songs, until the natives, slipping past in the grass outside, would shrug a shoulder and mutter things in Spanish to themselves about the “diablos Americanos.”

One day Johnny’s mozo brought the mail and dumped it on the table. Johnny leaned from his hammock, and fingered the four or five letters dejectedly. Keogh had come over from his bamboo shack in pajamas, although it was nearly noon, and was smoking and chopping lazily with a paper-knife at the legs of a centipede that crawled across the table. Johnny was in that mood of lotus-eating when the world tastes bitter in one’s mouth.

“Same old thing,” he complained. “Fool people writing for information about the country. They want to know all about raising coffee and fruit, and how to make a fortune without work. Half of ’em don’t even send stamps for an answer. They must think a consul has nothing to do but write letters. Open those letters for me, old man, and see what they want. I’m feeling too rocky to move.”

Keogh, acclimated beyond all possibility of ill-humor, drew his chair to the table with smiling compliance on his rose-pink countenance, and began to slit open the letters. Four of them were from citizens in various parts of the United States who seemed to regard the consul at Vibora as a cyclopaedia of information. They asked long lists of questions, numerically arranged, about the climate, products, possibilities, laws, business chances, and statistics of the country in which the consul had the honor representing his own government.

“Write ’em, please, Billy,” said that inert official, “just a line, referring them to the latest consular report. Tell ’em the State Department will be delighted to furnish the literary gems. Sign my name. Don’t let your pen scratch, Billy; it’ll keep me awake.”

“Don’t snore,” said Keogh, amiably, “and I’ll do your work for you. You need a corps of assistants, anyhow. Don’t see how you ever get out a report. Wake up a minute!⁠—here’s one more letter⁠—it’s from your own town, too⁠—Dalesburg.”

“That so?” murmured Johnny, showing a mild and obligatory interest. “What’s it about?”

“Postmaster writes,” explained Keogh. “Says a citizen of the town wants some facts and advice from you. Says the citizen has an idea in his head of coming down where you are and opening a shoe store. Wants to know if you think the business would pay. Says he’s heard of the boom along this coast, and wants to get in on the ground floor.”

In spite of the heat and his bad temper, Johnny’s hammock swayed with his laughter. Keogh laughed too; and the pet monkey on the top shelf of the bookcase chattered in shrill sympathy with the ironical reception of the letter from Dalesburg.

“Great bunions!” exclaimed the consul. “Shoe store! What’ll they ask about next, I wonder? Overcoat factory, I reckon. Say, Billy⁠—of our 3,000 citizens, how many do you suppose ever had on a pair of shoes?”

Keogh reflected judicially.

“Let’s see⁠—there’s you and me and⁠—”

“Not me,” said Johnny, promptly and incorrectly, holding up a foot encased in a disreputable deerskin zapato. “I haven’t been a victim to shoes in six months.”

“You’ve got ’em, anyhow,” went on Keogh. “And there’s Bridger, and Henschel, and Lutz, and Blanchard, and the two Lecouvres, and the quarantine doctor, and that Italian that’s agent for the banana company, and old Delgado⁠—no; he wears sandals. The comandante wears boots on parade day, and the juez politico wears cloth gaiters when he holds court. And⁠—oh, yes⁠—la Madama Mercedes Quintero Tomabilla Oliveras y Guerrera had on a pair of red kid slippers at the baile the other night. That’s about all. Don’t the soldiers at the cuartel?⁠—no, that’s so⁠—they are allowed shoes only when on the march. In town they turn their little toeses out to grass.”

“ ’Bout right,” agreed the consul. “Not over twenty out of the 3,000 ever felt leather on their walking arrangements. Oh, yes, Vibora is just the town for an enterprising shoe store⁠—that doesn’t want to part with its shoes. Wonder if old Patterson is trying to jolly me. He always was full of things he called jokes. We’ll jolly him back a few.”

Keogh dipped his pen, and wrote at Johnny’s dictation. Around many pauses, filled in with smoke and sundry travellings of the bottle and glasses, the following answer to the Dalesburg communication was perpetrated:

> Mr. Obadiah Patterson,
> Dalesburg, Miss.

> Dear Sir: In reply to your favor of July 2nd, I have the honor to inform you that, according to my opinion, there is no place on the habitable globe that presents to the eye stronger evidence of the need of a first-class shoe store than does the town of Vilabora. There are 3,000 inhabitants in the place, and not a single shoe store! The situation speaks for itself. This coast is rapidly becoming the goal of enterprising business men, but the shoe business is one that has been sadly overlooked or neglected. In fact, there is a considerable number of our citizens actually without shoes at present.

> Besides the want above mentioned, there is also a crying need for a brewery, a college of higher mathematics, a coal yard, and a clean and intellectual Punch and Judy show. I have the honor to be, sir,

“I throw in that postscript,” explained the consul, “so Uncle Obadiah won’t take offence at the official tone of the letter! Now, Billy, you get that correspondence fixed up and send Pancho to the estafeta with it. The Ariadne takes the mail out tomorrow if they make up that load of fruit today.”

The night programme in Vibora never varied. The recreations of the populace were soporific and flat. The people wandered about, barefoot, aimless, and silent, each with lighted cigar or cigarette. Looking down the dimly lighted ways you seemed to see a threading maze of brunette ghosts tangled with an accompanying procession of insane fireflies. In some houses the thrumming of lugubrious guitars added to the depression of the triste night. Giant tree-frogs rattled in the foliage as loudly as the end-man’s “bones” in a minstrel troupe. By nine o’clock the streets were vacant, and all were abed.

Nor at the consulate was there often a change of bill. Keogh came there nightly, for Vibora is close to the gratings of Avernus, and its one cool place was the consul’s little porch overlooking the sea. The brandy would be kept moving, and by ten o’clock sentiment would begin to stir in the heart of the self-exiled Johnny. Then he would relate to Keogh the story of his ended romance. Each night Keogh would be ready with untiring sympathy.

“But don’t think for a minute”⁠—thus would Johnny always conclude his woeful tale⁠—“that I’m grieving about that girl, Billy. I’ve forgotten her. She hardly ever enters my mind. If she would walk in that door right now my pulse wouldn’t gain a beat. That’s all over long ago.”

“Don’t I know it?” Keogh would answer. “Of course you’ve forgotten her. Proper thing to do. Wasn’t quite OK of her to listen to the knocks that⁠—er⁠—Dink Pawson kept giving you.”

“Pink Dawson!”⁠—a world of contempt would be in Johnny’s tones. “Poor white trash! Had a 500-acre farm, though, and that counted. Maybe I’ll get back at him some day. He told Rosine all about how wild I was, and kept her posted. All right. I never did anything low-down. Everybody in Mississippi knows the Atwoods. Say, Billy⁠—did you know my mother was a De Graffenreid?”

“Why, no,” Keogh would say; “is that so?” He had heard it some 300 times.

“Fact. The De Graffenreids of Hancock County. But I never think of that girl any more, do I, Billy?”

At this point Johnny would fall into a gentle slumber, and Keogh would saunter out to his own shack under the calabash tree at the edge of the plaza.

In a day or two the letter from the Dalesburg postmaster and its answer had been forgotten by the Vibora exiles. But on the 26th day of the July the fruit of the reply appeared upon the tree of events.

The Andador, a fruit steamer that visited Vibora regularly, drew into the harbor and anchored. The beach was lined with spectators while the quarantine doctor and the customhouse crew rowed out to attend to their duties.

An hour later Billy Keogh lounged into the consulate, clean and cool in his linen clothes, and grinning like a pleased shark.

“Guess what?” he said to Johnny, lounging in his hammock.

“Too hot to guess,” said Johnny, lazily.

“Your shoe-store man’s come,” said Keogh, rolling the sweet morsel on his tongue, “with a stock of goods big enough to supply the continent as far down as Tierra del Fuego. They’re carting his cases over to the customhouse now. Six barges full they brought ashore and have paddled back for the rest. Oh, ye saints in glory! won’t there be regalements in the air when he gets on to the joke and has an interview with Mr. Consul? It’ll be worth nine years in the tropics just to witness that one joyful moment.”

Keogh loved to take his mirth easily. He selected a clean place on the matting and lay upon the floor. The walls shook with his enjoyment. Johnny turned half over and blinked.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, “that anybody was fool enough to take that letter seriously.”

“Four-thousand-dollar stock of goods!” gasped Keogh, in ecstasy. “Talk about coals to Newcastle! Why didn’t he take a shipload of palm-leaf fans to Spitzbergen while he was about it? Saw the old codger on the beach. You ought to have been there when he put on his specs and squinted at the 500 or so barefooted citizens standing around.”

“Are you telling the truth, Billy?” asked the consul, weakly.

“Am I? You ought to see the buncoed gentleman’s daughter he brought along. Looks! She’d stack up like a thousand bricks at an inaugural ball. She makes the brick-dust señoritas here look like tar-babies.”

“Go on,” said Johnny, “if you can stop that asinine giggling. I hate to see a grown man make a laughing hyena of himself.”

“Name’s Hemstetter,” went on Keogh. “He’s a⁠—Hello! what’s the matter now?”

Johnny’s moccasined feet struck the floor with a thud as he wriggled out of his hammock.

“Get up, you idiot,” he said sternly, “or I’ll brain you with this inkstand. That’s Rosine and her father. Gad! what a drivelling idiot old Patterson is! Get up, here, Billy Keogh, and help me. What the devil are we going to do? Has all the world gone crazy?”

Keogh rose and dusted himself. He managed to regain a decorous demeanor.

“Situation has got to be met, Johnny,” he said, with some success at seriousness. “I didn’t think about its being your girl until you spoke. First thing to do is to get them comfortable quarters. You go down and face the music, and I’ll trot up to Henschel’s and see if Mrs. Henschel won’t take them in. They’ve got the decentest house in town.”

“Bless you, Billy!” said the consul. “I knew you wouldn’t desert me. The world’s bound to come to an end, but maybe we can stave it off for a day or two.”

Keogh hoisted his umbrella and set off for the Henschels’. Johnny put on his coat and hat. He picked up the brandy bottle, but set it down again without drinking, and marched bravely down to the beach.

In the shade of the customhouse walls he found Mr. Hemstetter and Rosine surrounded by a mass of gaping citizens. The customs officers were ducking and scraping, while the captain of the Andador interpreted the business of the new arrivals. Rosine looked healthy and very much alive. She was gazing at the strange scenes around her with amused interest. There was a faint blush upon her round cheek as she greeted her old admirer. Mr. Hemstetter shook hands with Johnny in a very friendly way. He was an oldish, impractical man⁠—one of the numerous class of erratic business men who are ever seeking a change.

“I am very glad to see you again, John⁠—may I call you John?” he said. “Let me thank you for your kind answer to our postmaster’s letter of inquiry. He volunteered to write to you on my behalf. I was looking about for something different in the way of a business in which the profits would be a little livelier. I had noticed in the papers that this coast was receiving much attention from investors. I am extremely grateful for your advice. I sold out everything I possessed and put the proceeds in as fine a stock of shoes as could be bought in the North. You have a picturesque town here, John. I hope business will be as good as your letter justifies me in anticipating.”

Johnny’s agony was abbreviated by the arrival of Keogh, who hurried up with the news that Mrs. Henshel woud be much pleased to place a couple of rooms at the service of Mr. Atwood’s friends. So there Mr. Hemstetter and his daughter were at once conducted and left to recuperate from their voyage, while Johny went down to see that the cases of shoes were safely stored after they had been opened and examined at the customhouse.

That night the consul and Keogh held a desperate consultation on the breezy porch.

“Send ’em back home,” suggested Keogh, reading Johnny’s thoughts.

“I would,” said the consul, after a little silence, “but I’ve been lying to you, Billy.”

“All right about that,” said Keogh, affably.

“I told you hundreds of times,” said Johnny, slowly, “that I’d forgotten that girl, didn’t I?”

“About three hundred and seventy-five,” admitted the monument of patience.

“I lied,” repeated the consul, “every time. I never forgot her for one minute. I was an obstinate ass for running away just because she said ‘no’ once. And I was too proud a fool to go back. I talked with Rosine a few minutes up at Henschel’s. I found out one thing. You remember the farmer fellow who was after her?”

“Dink Pawson?” asked Keogh.

“Pink Dawson. Well, he wasn’t a hill of beans to her. She says she didn’t believe the hard things he told her about me. But I’m sewed up now, Billy. That tomfool letter I sent has ruined whatever chance I had left. She’ll despise me when she finds out that her old father has been made the victim of a joke that a decent schoolboy wouldn’t have been guilty of. Shoes! Why he couldn’t sell twenty pairs of shoes in Vibora if he kept store here for twenty years. You put a pair of shoes on one of these Caribs or Spanish brown boys and what’d he do? Stand on his head and squeal until he’d kicked ’em off. None of ’em ever wore shoes and they never will. If I send ’em back home I’ll have to tell the whole story, and what’ll she think of me? I want that girl worse than ever, Billy, and now when she’s in reach I’ve lost her forever because I tried to be funny when the thermometer was at 102.”

“Keep cheerful,” said the optimistic Keogh. “Then let ’em open the store. I’ve been busy myself this afternoon. We can stir up a temporary boom in footgear anyhow. I’ll buy six pairs when the doors open. I’ve been around and seen all the fellows and explained the catastrophe. Lutz will take half a dozen pairs, Blanchard four, and the others anywhere from three to five. Old man Lecouvre is good for a dozen pairs, for he caught a glimpse of Miss Hemstetter, and he’s a Frenchman.”

“A dozen customers,” said Johnny, “for a $4,000 stock of shoes! It won’t work. There’s a big problem here to figure out. You go home, Billy, and leave me alone. I’ve got to work at it all by myself. Take that bottle of three-star along with you⁠—no, sir; not another ounce of booze for the United States consul. I’ll sit here tonight and pull out the think stop. If there’s a soft place on this proposition anywhere I’ll land on it. If there isn’t there’ll be another wreck to the credit of the gorgeous tropics.”

Keogh left, feeling that he could be of no use. Johnny laid a handful of cigars on a table and stretched himself in a steamer chair. When the sudden daylight broke, silvering the harbor ripples, he was still sitting there. Then he got up, whistling a little tune, and took his bath.

At nine o’clock he walked down to the dingy little cable office and hung for half an hour over a blank. The result of his application was the following message which he had transmitted at a cost of $33:

> To Pinkney Dawson

> Dalesburg, Miss.

> Draft for $100 comes to you next mail. Ship me immediately 500 pounds stiff, dry cockleburrs. New use here in arts. Market price twenty cents pound. Further orders likely. Rush.

Within three or four days a suitable building was secured for Mr. Hemstetter’s store on the main street of the town which ran parallel to the beach. The rent was moderate, and the stock of shoes made a fine showing on the shelves in their neat, white boxes.

Johnny’s friends stood by him loyally. On the first day Keogh strolled into the store about once every hour, and bought a pair of shoes. After he had purchased a pair each of extension soles, congress gaiters, button kids, gum boots, suede slippers, low-quartered calfs and dancing pumps, he sought out Johnny to find if there were any more kinds he could call for. The other English-speaking residents also played their parts nobly, by buying often and liberally. Keogh marshalled them and made them distribute their patronage, thus keeping up a fair run of trade for about a week. Mr. Hemstetter was gratified with the business done thus far, but expressed some surprise that the natives were so backward with their custom.

“Oh, they’re awfully shy,” explained Johnny. “They’ll get the habit pretty soon and you’ll do some lively business with Maduro gang.”

Two weeks after the consul sent his cable, a fruit steamer brought him a huge, mysterious brown bale of some unknown commodity. Johnny’s influence with the customhouse people was sufficiently strong for him to get the goods turned over to him without the usual inspection. He had the bale taken to the consulate and snugly stowed in the backroom. That night he ripped open a corner of it and took out a handful of the cockleburrs. They were the ripe August product as hard as filberts and bristling with spines and tough and sharp as needles. Johnny whistled his same little tune again, and went to find Billy Keogh.

Later in the night, when Vibora was steeped in slumber, he and Billy went forth into the deserted streets with their coats bulging like balloons. All up and down the main street they went, sowing the sharp burrs carefully in the sand, along every footpath, upon every yard of grass between the silent houses. No place where the foot of man, woman, or child might fall was slighted. And then they took the side streets and byways, missing none. Many trips they made to and from the prickly hoard. They sowed with the accuracy of Satan sowing tares and with the perseverance of Paul planting. And then, late in the night, they laid themselves down to sleep calmly as great generals do after laying their plans in accordance with the revised tactics.

With the first blush of dawn the purveyors of fruits and meats arranged their wares in and around the little market-house. Next from every ’dobe and palm hut and grass-thatched shack and dim patio glided women⁠—black women, brown women, lemon-colored women, women dun and yellow and tawny. They were the marketers starting to purchase the family supply of cassava, plantains, meat, fowls, and tortillas. Décoletté they were and bare-armed and barefooted, with a single skirt reaching below the knee. Stolid and ox-eyed, they stepped from their doorways into the narrow paths or upon the soft grass of the streets.

The first to emerge uttered ambiguous squeals, and raised one foot quickly. Another step and they sat down, with shrill cries of alarm, to pick at the new and painful insects that had stung them upon the feet. “Que picadores diablos!” they screeched to one another across the narrow ways. Some tried the grass instead of the paths, but there they were also stung and bitten by the strange little prickly balls. They plumped down in the grass, and added their lamentations to those of their sisters in the sandy paths. All through the town was heard the plaint of feminine jabber. The vendors in the market wondered why no customers came.

Then men, lords of the earth, came forth. They, too, began to hop, to dance, to limp, and to curse. They stood stranded and foolish, or stooped to pluck at the scourge that attacked their feet and ankles. Some loudly proclaimed the pest to be poisonous insects of an unknown species.

And then the children ran out for their morning romp. And now to the uproar was added the howls of limping infants and cockleburred childhood. Every minute the advancing day brought forth fresh victims.

Doña Maria Castillas y Buenventura de las Casas stepped from her honored doorway, as was her daily custom, to procure fresh bread from the panaderia across the street. She was clad in a skirt of flowered yellow satin, a chemise of ruffled linen, and wore a purple mantilla from the looms of Spain. Her lemon-tinted feet, alas! were bare. Her progress was majestic, for were not her ancestors hidalgos of Aragon? Three steps she made across the velvety grass, and set her aristocratic sole upon a bunch of Johnny’s burrs. Doña Maria Castillas y Buenventura de las Casas emitted a yowl even as a wildcat. Turning about, she fell upon hands and knees, and crawled⁠—ay, like a beast of the fields she crawled back to her honorable doorsill.

Don Señor Ildefonso Federico Valdazar, Juez de la Paz, weighing 20 stone, attempted to convey his bulk to the cantina at the corner of the plaza in order to assuage his matutinal thirst. The first plunge of his unshod foot into the cool grass struck a concealed mine. Don Ildefonso fell like a crumbled cathedral, crying out that he had been fatally bitten by a deadly scorpion. Everywhere were the shoeless citizens hopping, stumbling, limping, and picking from their feet the venemous insects that had come in a single night to harass them.

The first to perceive the remedy was Simon Benavides, the barber, a man of travel and education. Sitting upon a stone, he plucked burrs from his toes, and made oration:

“Behold, my friends, these bugs of the devil! I know them well. They soar through the skies in swarms like pigeons. These are dead ones that fell during the night. In Yucatan I have seen them as large as oranges. No! There they hiss like serpents, and have wings like bats. It is the shoes⁠—the shoes that one needs! Zapatos⁠—zapatos por mi!”

Simon hobbled to Mr. Hemstetter’s store and bought shoes. Coming out, he swaggered with impunity down the street. Men, women, and children took up the cry, “Zapatos!” That day Mr. Hemstetter sold 300 pairs of shoes.

Each night Johnny and Keogh sowed the crop that grew dollars by day. At the end of ten days, two-thirds of the stock of shoes were sold, and the store of cockleburrs were exhausted. Johnny cabled to Pink Dawson for another 500 pounds, paying twenty cents, as before.

One night Johnny took Rosine under a mango-tree and confessed everything. Then he repeated a question he had asked her once before, and wound up with a masterly “Now, what are you going to do about it?”

Rosine looked him in the eye and said: “You are a very wicked man. What am I going to do about it? How can I do anything? I have always understood that it took a minister to attend to the matter properly.”

Johnny bolted down the street, and routed out Keogh and a malarial Methodist minister who had a chapel in a lemon-grove. They all went to Henschel’s, and Johnny and Rosine were married, while Mrs. Henschel wept miserably with joy. Then Johnny went down to the store and addressed Mr. Hemstetter as “father-in-law,” and also confessed to him. Mr. Hemstetter put on his spectacles and said: “You strike me as being a most extraordinary young scamp. Now, what about the rest of the stock of shoes?”

When the second invoice of cockleburrs came in Johnny loaded them and the remainder of the shoes into a sloop and sailed down to Carrizo, a town twelve miles below. There he repeated the Vibora success, and came back with a bag of money and not so much as a shoestring.

As soon as Johnny could get the department to accept his resignation he left for the States with his happy bride and Mr. Hemstetter, who was inclined to attribute the success of the shoe enterprise to his own business sagacity. Keogh was appointed consul pro tempore.

Four days after Johnny’s departure a three-masted schooner tacked into the harbor, and a sunburnt young man with a shrewd eye was rowed ashore. He inquired the way to the consul’s office, and got him thither at a nervous gait.

Keogh was drawing a caricature of Uncle Sam on a pad of official letterheads. He looked up at his visitor.

“Where’s Johnny Atwood?” asked the sunburnt young man, in a business tone of voice.

“Gone,” said Keogh, working carefully at Uncle Sam’s goatee.

“Just like him,” said the nut-brown one. “Always gallivanting around instead of ’tending to business.”

“I’m looking after the business, just now,” remarked Keogh, making large stars on his Uncle’s vest.

“Are you⁠—then, say!⁠—I’ve got a whole load of them things in the basement of that ship out in that pond. I’ve got four tons and a half! Where’s the factory?”

“What things? What factory?” asked the new consul, with mild interest.

“Why, them cockleburrs,” said the visitor. “You know. Where’s the factory where you use ’em? I’ll give you a bargain in this lot. I’ve had everybody for ten miles around picking ’em for a month. I hired this ship to bring ’em over in. Fifteen cents a pound takes the load. Shall I drive the ship in and hitch?”

A look of supreme, almost incredulous delight dawned in Keogh’s ruddy countenance. He dropped his pencil. His eyes gloated upon his visitor. He trembled lest this great joy he felt was approaching should turn into a dream.

“For God’s sake, tell me,” said Keogh, earnestly, “are you Dink Pawson?”

“My name is Pink Dawson,” said the cornerer of the burr market.

Billy Keogh slid gently from his chair to his favorite strip of matting on the floor.

There were not many sounds in Vibora on that sultry afternoon. Of such that were may be mentioned a noise of unrighteous laughter from an Irish-American, while a sunburnt young man with a shrewd eye looked upon him with amazement. Also the “tramp, tramp” of many well-shod feet in the main street outside. Also the lonesome wash of the waves that beat along the shores of the Spanish Main.