When this man began to talk I perceived in him a certain power.  His voice was a persuasive instrument, upon which he played with a somewhat specious but effective art.  He did not try to make you forget his ugliness; he flaunted it in your face and made it part of the charm of his speech.  Shutting your eyes, you would have trailed after this rat-catcher’s pipes at least to the walls of Hamelin.  Beyond that you would have had to be more childish to follow.  But let him play his own tune to the words set down, so that if all is too dull, the art of music may bear the blame.

“Women,” said Judson Tate, “are mysterious creatures.”

My spirits sank.  I was not there to listen to such a world-old hypothesis—­to such a time-worn, long-ago-refuted, bald, feeble, illogical, vicious, patent sophistry—­to an ancient, baseless, wearisome, ragged, unfounded, insidious, falsehood originated by women themselves, and by them insinuated, foisted, thrust, spread, and ingeniously promulgated into the ears of mankind by underhanded, secret and deceptive methods, for the purpose of augmenting, furthering, and reinforcing their own charms and designs.

“Oh, I don’t know!” said I, vernacularly.

“Have you ever heard of Oratama?” he asked.

“Possibly,” I answered.  “I seem to recall a toe dancer—­or a suburban addition—­or was it a perfume?—­of some such name.”

“It is a town,” said Judson Tate, “on the coast of a foreign country of which you know nothing and could understand less.  It is a country governed by a dictator and controlled by revolutions and insubordination.  It was there that a great life-drama was played, with Judson Tate, the homeliest man in America, and Fergus McMahan, the handsomest adventurer in history or fiction, and Senorita Anabela Zamora, the beautiful daughter of the alcalde of Oratama, as chief actors.  And, another thing—­nowhere else on the globe except in the department of Trienta y tres in Uruguay does the chuchula plant grow.  The products of the country I speak of are valuable woods, dyestuffs, gold, rubber, ivory, and cocoa.”

“I was not aware,” said I, “that South America produced any ivory.”

“There you are twice mistaken,” said Judson Tate, distributing the words over at least an octave of his wonderful voice.  “I did not say that the country I spoke of was in South America—­I must be careful, my dear man; I have been in politics there, you know.  But, even so—­I have played chess against its president with a set carved from the nasal bones of the tapir—­one of our native specimens of the order of perissodactyle ungulates inhabiting the Cordilleras—­which was as pretty ivory as you would care to see.

“But is was of romance and adventure and the ways of women that was I going to tell you, and not of zoological animals.