uress Isabel Guilbert, the opera singer, whose troupe
of performers had been entertained by the president at San Mateo
during the past month on a scale less modest than that with which
royal visitors are often content. The reference to the "jack-rabbit
line" could mean nothing else than the mule-back system of transport
that prevailed between Coralio and the capital. The hint that the
"boodle" was "six figures short" made the condition of the national
treasury lamentably clear. Also it was convincingly true that the
ingoing party--its way now made a pacific one--would need the
"spondulicks." Unless its pledges should be fulfilled, and the spoils
held for the delectation of the victors, precarious indeed, would
be the position of the new government. Therefore it was exceeding
necessary to "collar the main guy," and recapture the sinews of war
and government.

Goodwin handed the message to Keogh.

"Read that, Billy," he said. "It's from Bob Englehart. Can you manage
the cipher?"

Keogh sat in the other half of the doorway, and carefully perused the
telegram.

"'Tis not a cipher," he said, finally. "'Tis what they call
literature, and that's a system of language put in the mouths
of people that they've never been introduced to by writers of
imagination. The magazines invented it, but I never knew before that
President Norvin Green had stamped it with the seal of his approval.
'Tis now no longer literature, but language. The dictionaries tried,
but they couldn't make it go for anything but dialect. Sure, now that
the Western Union indorses it, it won't be long till a race of people
will spring up that speaks it."

"You're running too much to philology, Billy," said Goodwin. "Do you
make out the meaning of it?"

"Sure," replied the philosopher of Fortune. "All languages come easy
to the man who must know 'em. I've even failed to misunderstand an
order to evacuate in classical Chinese when it was backed up by the
muzzle of a breech-loader. This little literary essay I hold in my
hands means a game of Fox-in-the-Morning. Ever play that, Frank, when
you was a kid?"

"I think so," said Goodwin, laughing. "You join hands all 'round,
and--"

"You do not," interrupted Keogh. "You've got a fine sporting game
mixed up in your head with 'All Around the Rosebush.' The spirit of
'Fox-in-the-Morning' is opposed to the holding of hands. I'll tell
you how it's played. This president man and his companion in play,
they stand up