Sully, I don't want to brag, but you remember how I brought Coughlin under the wire for leader of the nineteenth? Ours was the banner district.Don't you suppose I know how to manage a little monkey-cage of a country like that? Why, with the dough the General's willing to turn loose I could put two more coats of Japan varnish on him and have him elected Governor of Georgia.New York has got the finest lot of campaign managers in the world, Sully, and you give me a feeling of hauteur when you cast doubts on my ability to handle the political situation in a country so small that they have to print the names of the towns in the appendix and footnotes.'
"I argued with Denver some.I told him that politics down in that tropical atmosphere was bound to be different from the nineteenth district; but I might just as well have been a Congressman from North Dakota trying to get an appropriation for a lighthouse and a coast survey.Denver Galloway had ambitions in the manager line, and what I said didn't amount to as much as a fig-leaf at the National Dressmakers' Convention.'I'll give you three days to cogitate about going,' says Denver; 'and I'll introduce you to General Rompiro to-morrow, so you can get his ideas drawn right from the rosewood.'
"I put on my best reception-to-Booker-Washington manner, the next day and tapped the distinguished rubber-plant for what he knew.
"General Rompiro wasn't so gloomy inside as he appeared on the surface.He was polite enough; and he exuded a number of sounds that made a fair stagger at arranging themselves into language.It was English he aimed at, and when his system of syntax reached your mind it wasn't past you to understand it.If you took a college professor's magazine essay and a Chinese laundryman's explanation of a lost shirt and jumbled 'em together, you'd have about what the General handed you out for conversation.He told me all about his bleeding country, and what they were trying to do for it before the doctor came.But he mostly talked of Denver C.Galloway.
"'Ah, senor,' says he, 'that is the most fine of mans.Never I have seen one man so magnifico, so gr-r-rand, so conformable to make done things so swiftly by other mans.He shall make other mans do the acts and himself to order and regulate, until we arrive at seeing accomplishments of a suddenly.Oh, yes, senor.In my countree there is not such mans of so beegness, so good talk, so compliments, so strongness of sense and such.Ah, that Senor Galloway!'
"'Yes,' says I, 'old Denver is the boy you want.He's managed every kind of business here except filibustering, and he might as well complete the list.'
"Before the three days was up I decided to join Denver in his campaign.Denver got three months' vacation from his hotel owners.For a week we lived in a room with the General, and got all the pointers about his country that we could interpret from the noises he made.
When we got ready to start, Denver had a pocket full of memorandums, and letters from the General to his friends, and a list of names and addresses of loyal politicians who would help along the boom of the exiled popular idol.Besides these liabilities we carried assets to the amount of $20,000 in assorted United States currency.General Rompiro looked like a burnt effigy, but he was Br'er Fox himself when it came to the real science of politics.
"'Here is moneys,' says the General, 'of a small amount.There is more with me--moocho more.Plentee moneys shall you be supplied, Senor Galloway.More I shall send you at all times that you need.I shall desire to pay feefty--one hundred thousand pesos, if necessario, to be elect.How no? Sacramento! If that I am president and do not make one meelion dolla in the one year you shall keek me on that side!--/valgame Dios/!'
"Denver got a Cuban cigar-maker to fix up a little cipher code with English and Spanish words, and gave the General a copy, so we could cable him bulletins about the election, or for more money, and then we were ready to start.General Rompiro escorted us to the steamer.On the pier he hugged Denver around the waist and sobbed.'Noble mans,'
says he, 'General Rompiro propels you into his confidence and trust.
Go, in the hands of the saints to do the work for your friend./Viva la libertad/!'
"'Sure,' says Denver.'And viva la liberality an' la soaperino and hoch der land of the lotus and the vote us.Don't worry, General.
We'll have you elected as sure as bananas grow upside down.'
"'Make pictures on me,' pleads the General--'make pictures on me for money as it is needful.'
"'Does he want to be tattooed, would you think?' asks Denver, wrinkling up his eyes.
"'Stupid!' says I.'He wants you to draw on him for election expenses.
It'll be worse than tattooing.More like an autopsy.'
"Me and Denver steamed down to Panama, and then hiked across the Isthmus, and then by steamer again down to the town of Espiritu on the coast of the General's country.
"That was a town to send J.Howard Payne to the growler.I'll tell you how you could make one like it.Take a lot of Filipino huts and a couple of hundred brick-kilns and arrange 'em in squares in a cemetery.Cart down all the conservatory plants in the Astor and Vanderbilt greenhouses, and stick 'em about wherever there's room.
Turn all the Bellevue patients and the barbers' convention and the Tuskegee school loose in the streets, and run the thermometer up to 120 in the shade.Set a fringe of the Rocky Mountains around the rear, let it rain, and set the whole business on Rockaway Beach in the middle of January--and you'd have a good imitation of Espiritu.
