“One day I inveigled him into a walk out a couple of miles from the village, where there was an old grass hut on the bank of a little river.  While he was sitting on the grass, talking beautiful of the wisdom of the world that he had learned in books, I took hold of him easy and tied his hands and feet together with leather thongs that I had in my pocket.

“‘Lie still,’ says I, ’and meditate on the exigencies and irregularities of life till I get back.’

“I went to a shack in Aguas Frescas where a mighty wise girl named Timotea Carrizo lived with her mother.  The girl was just about as nice as you ever saw.  In the States she would have been called a brunette; but she was better than a brunette—­I should say she was what you might term an ecru shade.  I knew her pretty well.  I told her about my friend Wainwright.  She gave me a double handful of bark—­calisaya, I think it was—­and some more herbs that I was to mix with it, and told me what to do.  I was to make tea of it and give it to him, and keep him from rum for a certain time.  And for two weeks I did it.  You know, I liked Wainwright.  Both of us was broke; but Timotea sent us goat-meat and plantains and tortillas every day; and at last I got the curse of drink lifted from Clifford Wainwright.  He lost his taste for it.  And in the cool of the evening him and me would sit on the roof of Timotea’s mother’s hut, eating harmless truck like coffee and rice and stewed crabs, and playing the accordion.

“About that time President Gomez found out that the advice of C. Wainwright was the stuff he had been looking for.  The country was pulling out of debt, and the treasury had enough boodle in it for him to amuse himself occasionally with the night-latch.  The people were beginning to take their two-hour siestas again every day—­which was the surest sign of prosperity.

“So down from the regular capital he sends for Clifford Wainwright and makes him his private secretary at twenty thousand Peru dollars a year.  Yes, sir—­so much.  Wainwright was on the water-wagon—­thanks to me and Timotea—­and he was soon in clover with the government gang.  Don’t forget what done it—­calisaya bark with them other herbs mixed—­make a tea of it, and give a cupful every two hours.  Try it yourself.  It takes away the desire.

“As I said, a man can do a lot more for another party than he can for himself.  Wainwright, with his brains, got a whole country out of trouble and on its feet; but what could he do for himself?  And without any special brains, but with some nerve and common sense, I put him on his feet because I never had the weakness that he did—­nothing but a cigar for mine, thanks.  And—­”

Trotter paused.  I looked at his tattered clothes and at his deeply sunburnt, hard, thoughtful face.

“Didn’t Cartright ever offer to do anything for you?” I asked.

“Wainwright,” corrected Trotter.  “Yes, he offered me some pretty good jobs.  But I’d have had to leave Aguas Frescas; so I didn’t take any of ’em up.  Say, I didn’t tell you much about that girl—­Timotea.  We rather hit it off together.  She was as good as you find ’em anywhere—­Spanish, mostly, with just a twist of lemon-peel on top.  What if they did live in a grass hut and went bare-armed?