“‘Why,’ says I, ’the barber around the corner; or, if he’s royal, the king of the boot-blacks.’

“‘Never judge by looks,’ says Denver; ’he’s the dark-horse candidate for president of a South American republic.’

“‘Well,’ says I, ‘he didn’t look quite that bad to me.’

“Then Denver draws his chair up close and gives out his scheme.

“‘Sully,’ says he, with seriousness and levity, ’I’ve been a manager of one thing and another for over twenty years.  That’s what I was cut out for—­to have somebody else to put up the money and look after the repairs and the police and taxes while I run the business.  I never had a dollar of my own invested in my life.  I wouldn’t know how it felt to have the dealer rake in a coin of mine.  But I can handle other people’s stuff and manage other people’s enterprises.  I’ve had an ambition to get hold of something big—­something higher than hotels and lumber-yards and local politics.  I want to be manager of something way up—­like a railroad or a diamond trust or an automobile factory.  Now here comes this little man from the tropics with just what I want, and he’s offered me the job.’

“‘What job?’ I asks.  ’Is he going to revive the Georgia Minstrels or open a cigar store?’

“’He’s no ‘coon,’ says Denver.  ’He’s General Rompiro—­General Josey Alfonso Sapolio Jew-Ann Rompiro—­he has his cards printed by a news-ticker.  He’s the real thing, Sully, and he wants me to manage his campaign—­he wants Denver C. Galloway for a president-maker.  Think of that, Sully!  Old Denver romping down to the tropics, plucking lotus-flowers and pineapples with one hand and making presidents with the other!  Won’t it make Uncle Mark Hanna mad?  And I want you to go too, Sully.  You can help me more than any man I know.  I’ve been herding that brown man for a month in the hotel so he wouldn’t stray down Fourteenth Street and get roped in by that crowd of refugee tamale-eaters down there.  And he’s landed, and D. C. G. is manager of General J. A. S. J. Rompiro’s presidential campaign in the great republic of—­what’s its name?’

“Denver gets down an atlas from a shelf, and we have a look at the afflicted country.  ’Twas a dark blue one, on the west coast, about the size of a special delivery stamp.

“‘From what the General tells me,’ says Denver, ’and from what I can gather from the encyclopaedia and by conversing with the janitor of the Astor Library, it’ll be as easy to handle the vote of that country as it would be for Tammany to get a man named Geoghan appointed on the White Wings force.’

“‘Why don’t General Rumptyro stay at home,’ says I, ’and manage his own canvass?’