re sitting at table in the cantina of the Purified
Saints. Mellinger poured out wine, and was looking some worried; I
was thinking.

"'They're a sharp crowd,' he says, kind of fretful. 'They're
capitalized by a foreign syndicate after rubber, and they're loaded
to the muzzle for bribing. I'm sick,' goes on Mellinger, 'of comic
opera. I want to smell East River and wear suspenders again. At times
I feel like throwing up my job, but I'm d----n fool enough to be sort
of proud of it. "There's Mellinger," they say here. "_Por Dios!_ you
can't touch him with a million." I'd like to take that record back
and show it to Billy Renfrow some day; and that tightens my grip
whenever I see a fat thing that I could corral just by winking one
eye--and losing my graft. By ----, they can't monkey with me. They
know it. What money I get I make honest and spend it. Some day I'll
make a pile and go back and eat caviare with Billy. To-night I'll
show you how to handle a bunch of corruptionists. I'll show them what
Mellinger, private secretary, means when you spell it with the cotton
and tissue paper off.'

"Mellinger appears shaky, and breaks his glass against the neck of
the bottle.

"I says to myself, 'White man, if I'm not mistaken there's been a
bait laid out where the tail of your eye could see it.'

"That night, according to arrangements, me and Henry took the
phonograph to a room in a 'dobe house in a dirty side street, where
the grass was knee high. 'Twas a long room, lit with smoky oil lamps.
There was plenty of chairs, and a table at the back end. We set the
phonograph on the table. Mellinger was there, walking up and down,
disturbed in his predicaments. He chewed cigars and spat 'em out, and
he bit the thumb nail of his left hand.

"By and by the invitations to the musicale came sliding in by pairs
and threes and spade flushes. Their colour was of a diversity,
running from a three-days' smoked meerschaum to a patent-leather
polish. They were as polite as wax, being devastated with enjoyments
to give Senor Mellinger the good evenings. I understood their Spanish
talk--I ran a pumping engine two years in a Mexican silver mine, and
had it pat--but I never let on.

"Maybe fifty of 'em had come, and was seated, when in slid the king
bee, the governor of the district. Mellinger met him at the door, and
escorted him to the grand stand. When I saw that Latin man I knew
that Mellinger, private secretary, had all the dances on his ca