l enough
that they indulged a similar selfish hope, so I had no scruples about
using their hospitality to their disadvantage if I could. The subject,
however, was not mentioned at table, and we were all singularly abstemious
in the matter of champagne--so much so that as we rose from a rather long
session at the board we disclosed our sense of the ludicrousness of the
situation by laughing outright. Nevertheless, neither party would accept
defeat, and for the next few weeks the war of hospitality was fast and
furious. We dined together nearly every day, sometimes at my expense,
sometimes at theirs. We drove, rode, walked, played at billiards and made
many a night of it; but youth and temperance (in drink) pulled me through
without serious inroads on my health. We had early come to an
understanding and a deadlock. Failing to get the slenderest clew to the
location of the cotton I offered them one-fourth if they would surrender
it or disclose its hiding-place; they offered me one-fourth if I would
sign a permit for its shipment as private property.

All things have an end, and this amusing contest finally closed. Over the
remains of a farewell dinner, unusually luxurious, as befitted the
occasion, we parted with expressions of mutual esteem--not, I hope,
altogether insincere, and the ultimate fate of the cotton is to me
unknown. Up to the date of my departure from the agency not a bale of it
had either come into possession of the Government or found an outlet. I am
sometimes disloyal enough to indulge myself in the hope that they baffled
my successors as skilfully as they did me. One cannot help feeling a
certain tenderness for men who know and value a good dinner.

Another corrupt proposal that I had the good fortune to be afraid to
entertain came, as it were, from within. There was a dare-devil fellow
whom, as I know him to be dead, I feel justified in naming Jack Harris. He
was engaged in all manner of speculative ventures on his own account, but
the special agent had so frequently employed him in "enterprises of great
pith and moment" that he was in a certain sense and to a certain extent
one of us. He seemed to me at the time unique, but shortly afterward I had
learned to classify him as a type of the Californian adventurer with whose
peculiarities of manner, speech and disposition most of us are to-day
familiar enough. He never spoke of his past, having doubtless good reasons
for reticence, but any one learned in We