n my pants pocket I oughter be able to pass the rest o' my days here,"
and with my big ticket and my bag I hit the beach in Tangarine,
intendin' to go straight to the palace and get chummy with the new
President first thing.

But I never got so far as the palace. Not that time. About a
quarter-mile up from the beach was a joyous-lookin' hotel with shaded
verandas all 'round and a banana grove in the yard, and on a second look
a _cantina_ shinin' with mirrors and glasses and colored bottles on the
ground floor, and on another look spacious-lookin' suites o' rooms such
as were befittin' to _senors_ of wealth and leisure on the floor above.
And over these premises I cast one sailor-like view, and through the
for'ard gangway of that glass-mounted _cantina_ I hove my clothes-bag
and myself followed after. There was also a roulette wheel, which didn't
hurt the looks of the place either.

I felt so right to home that I anchored right there--oh, three or four
or five or six days; maybe it was two weeks; but anyway--all that don't
matter--when I steadied down so's to reason like the man o' sense my
skipper always used to say I was at bottom, I was down on the beach and
it was early in the mornin', and I was watchin' a lemon-colored sun
trying to rise out of the smooth Caribbean sea, and I was wonderin'
where it was I'd mislaid my clothes-bag. I could account for everythin'
but my clothes-bag. But that don't matter either now. I never saw it
again.

And while I sat there, not feelin' just like a high-score gun-captain
after target-practice, I hears a light step behind me, and pretty soon I
could feel an eye looking me over, and by'n'by a voice said: "A ver-ry
fine good morning, sir."

"Is it?" I says, and I looks up to see who the cheerful party is. And
there was a good-lookin', well-dressed, young, dark-complected chap,
with a little bamboo cane which he kept stickin' into the sand.

And he looks at me again and says, plainly pleased and yet a little sad,
too: "The Blues are in." And I says: "That so? Since when?" And he says:
"Since last nigh-it. You did not hear, the revoloo-shee-onn?"

And I says: "I didn't--I must 'a' been takin' a nap." But I guessed it
was a good thing; leastways they couldn't be any worse than the Reds--or
was it the Yellow chaps were in last?

"No Yellow in Tangarine," he says.

"Ha, ha!" I says--"an authority."

"No Yellow--Blues and Reds only. And as for the Reds, bah! But the
Blues, good--v