smartest man on the whole coast, but kept down by rum. I liked him.

"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 écru 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