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Immediately after my return to the Hotel Venezuela Schnitzel excused himself, and half an hour later returned in triumph with the cable operator and ordered lunch for both. They imbibed much sweet champagne.

When we again were safe at sea, I said: “Schnitzel, how much did you pay that Frenchman to let you read my second cable?”

Schnitzel’s reply was prompt and complacent.

“One hundred dollars gold. It was worth it. Do you want to know how I doped it out?”

I even challenged him to do so. “‘Roses red’–war declared; ‘violets blue’–outlook bad, or blue; ‘send snow’–send squadron, because the white squadron is white like snow. See? It was too easy.”

“Schnitzel,” I cried, “you are wonderful!”

Schnitzel yawned in my face.

“Oh, you don’t have to hit the soles of my feet with a night-stick to keep me awake,” he said.

After I had been a week at sea, I found that either I had to believe that in all things Schnitzel was a liar, or that the men of the Nitrate Trust were in all things evil. I was convinced that instead of the people of Valencia robbing them, they were robbing both the people of Valencia and the people of the United States.

To go to war on their account was to degrade our Government. I explained to Schnitzel it was not becoming that the United States navy should be made the cat’s-paw of a corrupt corporation. I asked his permission to repeat to the authorities at Washington certain of the statements he had made.

Schnitzel was greatly pleased.

“You’re welcome to tell ’em anything I’ve said,” he assented. “And,” he added, “most of it’s true, too.”

I wrote down certain charges he had made, and added what I had always known of the nitrate fight. It was a terrible arraignment. In the evening I read my notes to Schnitzel, who, in a corner of the smoking-room, sat, frowning importantly, checking off each statement, and where I made an error of a date or a name, severely correcting me.

Several times I asked him, “Are you sure this won’t get you into trouble with your ‘people’? You seem to accuse everybody on each side.”

Schnitzel’s eyes instantly closed with suspicion.

“Don’t you worry about me and my people,” he returned sulkily. “That’s my secret, and you won’t find it out, neither. I may be as crooked as the rest of them, but I’m not giving away my employer.”

I suppose I looked puzzled.

“I mean not a second time,” he added hastily. “I know what you’re thinking of, and I got five thousand dollars for it. But now I mean to stick by the men that pay my wages.”

“But you’ve told me enough about each of the three to put any one of them in jail.”

“Of course, I have,” cried Schnitzel triumphantly.

“If I’d let down on any one crowd you’d know I was working for that crowd, so I’ve touched ’em all up. Only what I told you about my crowd–isn’t true.”

The report we finally drew up was so sensational that I was of a mind to throw it overboard. It accused members of the Cabinet, of our Senate, diplomats, business men of national interest, judges of the Valencia courts, private secretaries, clerks, hired bullies, and filibusters. Men the trust could not bribe it had blackmailed. Those it could not corrupt, and they were pitifully few, it crushed with some disgraceful charge.

Looking over my notes, I said:

“You seem to have made every charge except murder.”

“How’d I come to leave that out?” Schnitzel answered flippantly. “What about Coleman, the foreman at Bahia, and that German contractor, Ebhardt, and old Smedburg? They talked too much, and they died of yellow-fever, maybe, and maybe what happened to them was they ate knockout drops in their soup.”

I disbelieved him, but there came a sudden nasty doubt.

“Curtis, who managed the company’s plant at Barcelona, died of yellow-fever,” I said, “and was buried the same day.”

For some time Schnitzel glowered uncertainly at the bulkhead.