"Archie said he'd be damned. Then: 'How'll we get out of here? For we gotta go east after this, Alec.'
"And Johnnie Sing, listening, takes the five hundred I'd given him and hands it to me. I don't want to take it, and he says, 'Plenty more--see,' and with his jackknife begins opening the wadding of his coat, and out come bills and bills and bills. All his property, twenty-odd thousand dollars, was sewed up there in big bills. And when 'twas all out he offers it to us, telling us to help ourselves. And Archie and me said no, the five hundred would do us to pay our way back to Gloucester here, and meals on the way, o' course. And Johnnie, by our advice, he comes east, too, with his little wife, and stepped off in New York; and that's where we left him.
"A fine little team, Johnnie and his wife. And the _Hattie_? If there's any of you never seen her, then you ought to when she was alive. A great little vessel, the _Hattie Rennish_!"
Revolutions? These days? In those South American countries? Sh-h, boy, sh-h--you don't know. In th' old gunboat days in the Caribbeans we never called it a good week 'nless we suppressed three or four. And at that I think we used to miss some.
Believe me, son, those were the days when they knew how to revolutionize. You'd turn in of a night with the Blues or the Reds or Greens, in, and have breakfast maybe in the mornin' with the Purples or the Violets and brass bands celebratin' the vict'ry in the Palace square.
And the first thing every new party did when they got in was to start up the Bureau of Printin' 'nd Engravin' and roll off a few billion dollars of gover'ment money. In Guadalquique the money for all parties was the same, except each party used to rubber-stamp its name across the face. An old navy yeoman hit the beach there one time named Tommie Anderson and he was made chief of the Bureau o' Printin' 'nd Engravin' by the Greens because he could make a rubber hand-stamp while they waited. Some traitor who didn't get his 'd absconded with the 'ficial one, Tommie said.
Of course that kind o' work tends to debilitate the best kind o' money. In Almatara, which was one o' the best little revolutionary countries ever I struck, you could see nigger boot-blacks shootin' crap for two or three thousand dollars a throw of a holiday in the market square. It used to cost a thousand dollars for a shine--that's a first-class shine for a foreigner, I mean. The natives didn't have to pay that much.