Adventure Magazine Cover — page 76: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

640 Tocas, travel to the port, take over the customs money, pay the army, get up the artillery and put the three gunboats there in commission so as to hold the entire coast while he made a clean sweep inland. He wanted his second in command relieved as soon as possible, as that general’s strat- egic and diplomatic services would be needed in the siege of the capital. Old Torres was still raving about this man when the wires went bad and the talk ended. “Boys, I will never forget the morning I arrived in Puerto del Nogales. I had a guard of twenty men including Joey, who had begged to be taken along. From the hill above the town I could see twenty or thirty vessels in the harbor. They had been held out by the blockage but now had got in, discharged and were loading. The freight yards were piled with incoming merchandise. The custom-house was do- ing more business than a county fair. “Outside the town I was met by a big mounted escort whose officer was all defer- ence and who said he had orders to conduct me direct to the general in command as the garrison was drawn up in the plaza to re- ceive me. I asked him the name of the general. He tried to tell me, but it evi- dently pained him. ‘““As we rode into the square the guns began to boom and the band to play and there in the center was the general with his staff and he was certainly the most brilliant bird of plumage I ever saw. He was about as big as a minute, but he sat on the back of a giant white draught-horse. His pants were blue and red. He wore a brass German helmet. His dress coat was solid gold. As I approached after the salute and we came face to face, may I never see a bottle again if my superior officer wasn’t little Abie Ber- kintowttz! ‘“‘Now, boys, we all know too much about dignity south of the Rio Grande for any one to suppose that I let on, though Ialmost fell out of my saddle. Behind me some one was weeping with pure joy. That was Joey. I thought it was because Abie was not dead. I still had something to learn. “Tt was two hours before I got him alone in a room of the casa municipal and then I turned on him. ‘You little rascal,’ said I, ‘how the devil did you pull this off? What license have you got to be a general?’ “He almost got down on his knees to explain to me that he had not been cap- Adventure tured at all—that he had started to run away when the fight began, only he had taken the wrong direction and run straight into Torres’ army. He thought he might as well pretend to be somebody as nobody, since everybody around was pretending any- how, so he pretended he was a great Rus- sian general, and ‘Torres believed him. Without thinking, he tried to send a tele- gram to Joey and when it went through and Torres found the wires were open, he made him a colonel in charge of commun- ications. When he put them on a business footing, according to New York ideas, Torres was so pleased that he gave him the second place in the army, made him minister of finance in his provisional government and put him in charge of the custom-house. ‘And please, you should ought to sce vat a business I make it,’ he concluded. “T found he had been in communication with Joey all the time and the cipher had been roman letters for Yiddish words. It had been his idea to have me join with Torres. Why? So he could rejoin with Joey. “Well, he made Joey a general before sunset and the next day the news came that Torres had had a bloodless victory and was president. He wanted his prize strategist and statesman to come at once. General Berkintowitz arranged to have the custom accounts turned over to me in two days. “By a strange coincidence the mail steamer was sailing at that hour for France and Joey was to go back to New York via Europe. He said a pathetic good-by to both me and Abie and his last act was to hand me his old smooth-bore as a keepsake. After we had gone a little way up the dock Abie cried out that he must run back and kiss Joey once again. He would join mein the casa municipal in a few minutes. “T strolled on up the street and into the square. I saw two porters lugging a box into the casa municipal and when I entered the commandant’s office there sat the box on the table. I sat down to wait. The cathedral bells struck noon. An _ hour passed. No sign of the minister of finance, the second in command of the army, the receiver of customs at Puerto del Nogales. The French steamer was now hull-down on the horizon. A sudden terrible thought grabbed me. I ran to that box and threw it open. First was a packet—the customs sheets! I looked at the control sheet. CORMICLOO© S (©