“Sit down,” said Riley to Con, “and I’ll tell you.

“Last summer me and Tim concludes that an American bar in this nation of Nicaragua would pay.  There was a town on the coast where there’s nothing to eat but quinine and nothing to drink but rum.  The natives and foreigners lay down with chills and get up with fevers; and a good mixed drink is nature’s remedy for all such tropical inconveniences.

“So we lays in a fine stock of wet goods in New York, and bar fixtures and glassware, and we sails for that Santa Palma town on a lime steamer.  On the way me and Tim sees flying fish and plays seven-up with the captain and steward, and already begins to feel like the high-ball kings of the tropics of Capricorn.

“When we gets in five hours of the country that we was going to introduce to long drinks and short change the captain calls us over to the starboard binnacle and recollects a few things.

“‘I forgot to tell you, boys,’ says he, ’that Nicaragua slapped an import duty of 48 per cent. ad valorem on all bottled goods last month.  The President took a bottle of Cincinnati hair tonic by mistake for tobasco sauce, and he’s getting even.  Barrelled goods is free.’

“‘Sorry you didn’t mention it sooner,’ says we.  And we bought two forty-two gallon casks from the captain, and opened every bottle we had and dumped the stuff all together in the casks.  That 48 per cent would have ruined us; so we took the chances on making that $1,200 cocktail rather than throw the stuff away.

“Well, when we landed we tapped one of the barrels.  The mixture was something heartrending.  It was the color of a plate of Bowery pea soup, and it tasted like one of those coffee substitutes your aunt makes you take for the heart trouble you get by picking losers.  We gave a nigger four fingers of it to try it, and he lay under a cocoanut tree three days beating the sand with his heels and refused to sign a testimonial.

“But the other barrel!  Say, bartender, did you ever put on a straw hat with a yellow band around it and go up in a balloon with a pretty girl with $8,000,000 in your pocket all at the same time?  That’s what thirty drops of it would make you feel like.  With two fingers of it inside you you would bury your face in your hands and cry because there wasn’t anything more worth while around for you to lick than little Jim Jeffries.  Yes, sir, the stuff in that second barrel was distilled elixir of battle, money and high life.  It was the color of gold and as clear as glass, and it shone after dark like the sunshine was still in it.  A thousand years from now you’ll get a drink like that across the bar.