“You are not an American?”

“I am a Russian, an anarchist once, and now I am for Root and Lodge, the stand-pats.  I lived in Russia in its darkest days, under several czars, when your life was the forfeit of a wink.  I was a lawyer there, a politician, an intrigant.  I knew Bebel and Jaures and the men before them.  I lived in Germany many years, in France, in England, anywhere, everywhere.  I first came to New York from Siberia.  I was broke.  The Civil War was on.  There were agents of Lee and Jeff Davis in New York seeking sailors.  They offered lots of money,—­thousands,—­and I went along, smuggled into the South by an underground road.”

Stroganoff threw away the shreds of tobacco, now a mere fiery wafer that threatened his mouth’s seine of silver strands.  He put his hand in his Prince Albert and scratched his stomach.

“Mr. Stroganoff,” I queried, with a moral tide rising, “how could you join in a life-and-death issue like that of the Civil War, and kill men without hatred of their cause in your heart?”

He patted my shoulder.

“My dear young American,” he replied, “you join anything, even a sheriff’s posse, into which you are dragged, and have a bullet from the other side slit your ear, or a round shot bang against your deck, and you’ll soon convince yourself that you are in the right, or, anyway, that your adversary is a scoundrel.  I handled a gun on the Merrimac in Hampton Roads when that cheese-box of a Monitor rattled her solid shot on our slippery sides.  I was two years in that damned un-Civil War, and as I started on the Southern side, I stayed on it.  I left the navy to go with John Mosby and burn houses.  When the war was over, and I recovered from my wound, I went to ’Frisco and crossed to Siberia, and thus back to Moscow.  No, I never was an exile in Siberia or in a Russian prison.  I knew and worked for the leaders of the old Nihilists.  I was with them till I knew them, and then I saw they were selfish and fakers.  I knew the socialist chiefs in France and Germany, the fathers of the present movement there.  I was red-hot for the cause until I knew them, and I quit.”

He sat meditatively for a few moments.

“I’m all but eighty years old,” the raider of the ’60’s continued sorrowfully.  “I work now for Chinese, preparing their mail, their custom-house papers, and orders.  I scrape along like a watch-dog in a sausage factory, getting sufficient to eat, but fearful all the time that the job will kill me.  Most of the time I live a few kilometers from Papeete, toward Fa’a, and come in to town about steamer-time.  I sleep in the chicken-coop or anywhere.  I make about forty francs a month.”  He stamped upon the grass.  “I take it you are a journalist, and, do you know, what is needed here most is publicity.  Graft permeates the whole scheme.  Mind you, there are no secrets.  You could not whisper anything to a cocoanut-tree but that the entire island would know it to-morrow.  But there is no open publicity.  Start a newspaper!”