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m--see?" he exulted, candidly. "I hold him by that name better than if I had him chained up by the leg to the deck of the steam-launch. "And mark," he added, after a pause, "he does not deny it. I am not wronging him in any way. He is a convict of some sort, anyhow." "But I suppose you pay him some wages, don't you?" I asked. "Wages! What does he want with money here? He gets his food from my kitchen and his clothing from the store. Of course I'll give him something at the end of the year, but you don't think I'd employ a convict and give him the same money I would give an honest man? I am looking after the interests of my company first and last." I admitted that, for a company spending fifty thousand pounds every year in advertising, the strictest economy was obviously necessary. The manager of the Maranon Estancia grunted approvingly. "And I'll tell you what," he continued: "if I were certain he's an anarchist and he had the cheek to ask me for money, I would give him the toe of my boot. However, let him have the benefit of the doubt. I am perfectly willing to take it that he has done nothing worse than to stick a knife into somebody--with extenuating circumstances--French fashion, don't you know. But that subversive sanguinary rot of doing away with all law and order in the world makes my blood boil. It's simply cutting the ground from under the feet of every decent, respectable, hard-working person. I tell you that the consciences of people who have them, like you or I, must be protected in some way; or else the first low scoundrel that came along would in every respect be just as good as myself. Wouldn't he, now? And that's absurd!" He glared at me. I nodded slightly and murmured that doubtless there was much subtle truth in his view. The principal truth discoverable in the views of Paul the engineer was that a little thing may bring about the undoing of a man. "_Il ne faut pas beaucoup pour perdre un homme_," he said to me, thoughtfully, one evening. I report this reflection in French, since the man was of Paris, not of Barcelona at all. At the Maranon he lived apart from the station, in a small shed with a metal roof and straw walls, which he called mon atelier. He had a work-bench there. They had given him several horse-blankets and a saddle--not that he ever had occasion to ride, but because no other bedding was used by the working-hands, who were all vaqueros--cattlemen. And on this horsem
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