“Well, I’d been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb’s about long enough then, so I wired High Jack ‘Yes’; and he sent me a ticket, and I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me.  First of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from her home and environments.

“‘Run away?’ I asked.

“‘Vanished,’ says High Jack.  ’Disappeared like your shadow when the sun goes under a cloud.  She was seen on the street, and then she turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward.  The whole community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.’

“‘That’s bad—­that’s bad,’ says I.  ’She was a mighty nice girl, and as smart as you find em.’

“High Jack seemed to take it hard.  I guess he must have esteemed Miss Blue Feather quite highly.  I could see that he’d referred the matter to the whiskey-jug.  That was his weak point—­and many another man’s.  I’ve noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink either just before or just after it happens.

“From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a tramp steamer bound for Belize.  And a gale pounded us all down the Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula.  Suppose the ship had run against that name in the dark!

“‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,’ says High Jack Snakefeeder.  So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.

“’We will find ruins here or make ’em,’ says High.  ’The Government doesn’t care which we do.  An appropriation is an appropriation.’

“Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town.  Them biblical towns we read about—­Tired and Siphon—­after they was destroyed, they must have looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca place.  It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597.  The citizens were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of ’em was light-colored, which I was surprised to see.  The town was huddled up on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server couldn’t have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers.  We wondered what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found out that it was Major Bing.

“Major Bing was the ointment around the fly.  He had the cochineal, sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and pure food adulteration concessions cornered.  He had five-sixths of the Boca de Thingama-jiggers working for him on shares.  It was a beautiful graft.  We used to brag about Morgan and E. H. and others of our wisest when I was in the provinces—­but now no more.  That peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without even the observation tower showing.

“Major Bing’s idea was this.  He had the population go forth into the forest and gather these products.  When they brought ’em in he gave ’em one-fifth for their trouble.  Sometimes they’d strike and demand a sixth.  The Major always gave in to ’em.