“Because the Linburnes were getting a divorce, and because Laura wrote you 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 government was to revoke the iniquitous concession of the San Pedro gold mine, made to “a group of greedy North American capitalists by the former corrupt and evil administration.”

Riatt’s bearing during this unhappy experience was universally praised.  As he went in and out of his broker’s office, not a trace of anxiety visible upon his countenance, men would nudge each other and whisper, “Did you ever see such nerve?  He stands to lose a million.”