“But Fergus was no talker.  He was brought up with the idea that to be beautiful was to make good.  His conversation was about as edifying as listening to a leak dropping in a tin dish-pan at the head of the bed when you want to go to sleep.  But he and me got to be friends—­maybe because we was so opposite, don’t you think?  Looking at the Hallowe’en mask that I call my face when I’m shaving seemed to give Fergus pleasure; and I’m sure that whenever I heard the feeble output of throat noises that he called conversation I felt contented to be a gargoyle with a silver tongue.

“One time I found it necessary to go down to this coast town of Oratama to straighten out a lot of political unrest and chop off a few heads in the customs and military departments.  Fergus, who owned the ice and sulphur-match concessions of the republic, says he’ll keep me company.

“So, in a jangle of mule-train bells, we gallops into Oratama, and the town belonged to us as much as Long Island Sound doesn’t belong to Japan when T. R. is at Oyster Bay.  I say us; but I mean me.  Everybody for four nations, two oceans, one bay and isthmus, and five archipelagoes around had heard of Judson Tate.  Gentleman adventurer, they called me.  I had been written up in five columns of the yellow journals, 40,000 words (with marginal decorations) in a monthly magazine, and a stickful on the twelfth page of the New York Times.  If the beauty of Fergus McMahan gained any part of our reception in Oratama, I’ll eat the price-tag in my Panama.  It was me that they hung out paper flowers and palm branches for.  I am not a jealous man; I am stating facts.  The people were Nebuchadnezzars; they bit the grass before me; there was no dust in the town for them to bite.  They bowed down to Judson Tate.  They knew that I was the power behind Sancho Benavides.  A word from me was more to them than a whole deckle-edged library from East Aurora in sectional bookcases was from anybody else.  And yet there are people who spend hours fixing their faces—­rubbing in cold cream and massaging the muscles (always toward the eyes) and taking in the slack with tincture of benzoin and electrolyzing moles—­to what end?  Looking handsome.  Oh, what a mistake!  It’s the larynx that the beauty doctors ought to work on.  It’s words more than warts, talk more than talcum, palaver more than powder, blarney more than bloom that counts—­the phonograph instead of the photograph.  But I was going to tell you.

“The local Astors put me and Fergus up at the Centipede Club, a frame building built on posts sunk in the surf.  The tide’s only nine inches.  The Little Big High Low Jack-in-the-game of the town came around and kowtowed.  Oh, it wasn’t to Herr Mees.  They had heard about Judson Tate.

“One afternoon me and Fergus McMahan was sitting on the seaward gallery of the Centipede, drinking iced rum and talking.

“‘Judson,’ says Fergus, ‘there’s an angel in Oratama.’