and deduction. He had taken up political intrigue as a matter of
business. He was acute enough to wield a certain influence among
the leading schemers, and he was prosperous enough to be able to
purchase the respect of the petty-officeholders. There was always
a revolutionary party; and to it he had allied himself; for the
adherents of a new administration received the rewards of their
labors. There was now a Liberal party seeking to overturn President
Miraflores. If the wheel successfully revolved, Goodwin stood to win
a concession to 30,000 manzanas of the finest coffee lands in the
interior. Certain incidents in the recent career of President
Miraflores had excited a shrewd suspicion in Goodwin's mind that the
government was near a dissolution from another cause than that of a
revolution, and now Englehart's telegram had come as a corroboration
of his wisdom.

The telegram, which had remained unintelligible to the Anchurian
linguists who had applied to it in vain their knowledge of Spanish
and elemental English, conveyed a stimulating piece of news to
Goodwin's understanding. It informed him that the president of the
republic had decamped from the capital city with the contents of the
treasury. Furthermore, that he was accompanied in his flight by that
winning adventuress Isabel Guilbert, the opera singer, whose troupe
of performers had been entertained by the president at San Mateo
during the past month on a scale less modest than that with which
royal visitors are often content. The reference to the "jackrabbit
line" could mean nothing else than the mule-back system of transport
that prevailed between Coralio and the capital. The hint that the
"boodle" was "six figures short" made the condition of the national
treasury lamentably clear. Also it was convincingly true that the
ingoing party--its way now made a pacific one--would need the