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