As I worked it out, Schnitzel was a spy because it gave him an importance he had not been able to obtain by any other effort.  As a child and as a clerk, it was easy to see that among his associates Schnitzel must always have been the butt.  Until suddenly, by one dirty action, he had placed himself outside their class.  As he expressed it:  “Whenever I walk through the office now, where all the stenographers sit, you ought to see those slobs look after me.  When they go to the president’s door, they got to knock, like I used to, but now, when the old man sees me coming to make my report after one of these trips he calls out, ‘Come right in, Mr. Schnitzel.’  And like as not I go in with my hat on and offer him a cigar.  An’ they see me do it, too!”

To me, that speech seemed to give Schnitzel’s view of the values of his life.  His vanity demanded he be pointed at, if even with contempt.  But the contempt never reached him—­he only knew that at last people took note of him.  They no longer laughed at him, they were afraid of him.  In his heart he believed that they regarded him as one who walked in the dark places of world politics, who possessed an evil knowledge of great men as evil as himself, as one who by blackmail held public ministers at his mercy.

This view of himself was the one that he tried to give me.  I probably was the first decent man who ever had treated him civilly, and to impress me with his knowledge he spread that knowledge before me.  It was sale, shocking, degrading.

At first I took comfort in the thought that Schnitzel was a liar.  Later, I began to wonder if all of it were a lie, and finally, in a way I could not doubt, it was proved to me that the worst he charged was true.

The night I first began to believe him was the night we touched at Cristobal, the last port in Valencia.  In the most light-hearted manner he had been accusing all concerned in the nitrate fight with every crime known in Wall Street and in the dark reaches of the Congo River.

“But, I know him, Mr. Schnitzel,” I said sternly.  “He is incapable of it.  I went to college with him.”

“I don’t care whether he’s a rah-rah boy or not,” said Schnitzel, “I know that’s what he did when he was up the Orinoco after orchids, and if the tribe had ever caught him they’d have crucified him.  And I know this, too:  he made forty thousand dollars out of the Nitrate Company on a ten-thousand-dollar job.  And I know it, because he beefed to me about it himself, because it wasn’t big enough.”

We were passing the limestone island at the entrance to the harbor, where, in the prison fortress, with its muzzle-loading guns pointing drunkenly at the sky, are buried the political prisoners of Valencia.