ignantly:

"Why should they interfere?"

"Because," explained the consul, "they are fugitives from justice, and
they don't want to go home. Ward is wanted for forgery or some polite
crime, I don't know which. And Colonel Goddard for appropriating the
State funds of Alabama. Ward knew what he was doing and made a lot out
of it. He's still rich. No one's weeping over him. Goddard's case is
different. He was imposed on and made a catspaw. When he was State
treasurer the men who appointed him came to him one night and said they
must have some of the State's funds to show a bank examiner in the
morning. They appealed to him on the ground of friendship, as the men
who'd given him his job. They would return the money the next evening.
Goddard believed they would. They didn't, and when some one called for
a show-down the colonel was shy about fifty thousand dollars of the
State's money. He lost his head, took the boat out of Mobile to Porto
Cortez, and hid here. He's been here twenty years and all the
Amapalans love him. He's the adopted father of their country. They're
so afraid he'll be taken back and punished that they'll never consent
to an extradition treaty even if the other Americans, Mellen, Jackson,
and Feiberger, weren't paying them big money not to consent. President
Mendoza himself told me that as long as Colonel Goddard honored his
country by remaining in it, he was his guest, and he would never agree
to extradition. 'I could as soon,' he said, 'sign his death-warrant.'"

Everett grinned dismally.

"That's rather nice of them," he said, "but it's hard on me. But," he
demanded, "why Ward? What has he done for Amapala? Is it because of
Cobre, because of his services as an archaeologist?"

The consul glanced around the patio and dragged his chair nearer to
Everett.

"This is my own dope," he whispered; "it may be wrong. Anyway, it's
only for your private information."

He waited until, with a smile, Everett agreed to secrecy.

"Chet Ward," protested the consul, "is no more an archaeologist than I
am! He talks well about Cobre, and he ought to, because every word he
speaks is cribbed straight from Hauptmann's monograph, published in
1855. And he has dug up something at Cobre; something worth a darned
sight more than stone monkeys and carved altars. But his explorations
are a bluff. They're a blind to cover up what he's really after; what
I think he's found!"

As though wishing to be urg