Paxton looked his astonishment. “What are you going to do with it?”
“I am going to South America,” Hawley announced. “To Baracoa, to be precise. I suppose you recall, Tom, the sensational disappearance of President Felix, a couple of years ago?”
“Of course,” Paxton replied. He had a phenomenal memory for contemporaneous history. It was the boast of the Sentinel staff that he could give, offhand, facts and figures of any event of importance in any part of the world within the past ten years.
“Francisco Felix,” he went on, as though reading from a book, “the poor Baracoa laborer who became president. They called him ‘the South American Abraham Lincoln.’ He was the idol of the people—the most beloved and respected executive Baracoa has ever had—until he proved himself to be a crook by absconding with the contents of the national treasury.”
The Camera Chap smiled. “That is the story which is generally accepted,” he said quietly. “But there is a possibility that the world may have done President Felix a great injustice.”
“What do you mean?” Paxton asked, looking searchingly in the other’s face.
“It now appears,” said the Camera Chap, “that instead of being a fugitive and an absconder, Felix may really have been the victim of a daring conspiracy; that instead of being free in some part of Europe at this moment, living in luxury on his loot, the unhappy man is in reality eating out his heart in a South American dungeon—where he has been ever since that fatal night that he is supposed to have skipped from Baracoa in his private yacht. In other words, Tom, it was all a frame-up. According to this story, Felix was kidnaped by the Portiforo party, who, realizing that he was too strong with the people to be deposed by an ordinary revolution, took this means of discrediting him and seizing the reins of government.”
Editor Paxton smiled incredulously. “Sounds pretty far-fetched. Yet I don’t know,” he added musingly. “Almost anything is possible down in that part of the continent; and I recall that there were some circumstances about Felix’s disappearance which struck me at the time as queer. There is the fact, for instance, that he has never been seen since the day his yacht reached the south coast of France.”
“He wasn’t seen even then,” Hawley reminded him. “At least, there is no proof that the man who came ashore was really Felix. The only persons who saw him were some French peasants, and, of course, they wouldn’t know Felix by sight.”
“There was the crew of the yacht,” Paxton suggested. “You are forgetting, perhaps, that later on they were caught and they admitted the whole business.”