“Possibly Portiforo has not pulled the wool over Throgmorton’s eyes,” the little man who sat at the president’s right suggested quietly. “He may not have found it at all necessary to do that.” There was something about the speaker’s tone which caused the other members of the cabinet to look at him curiously, and prompted the president to ask, quite calmly: “Will you say what you mean to imply by that remark, Mr. Attorney General?”
The little man smiled—a peculiar form of smile which seemed to be done with his eye only. “The American minister to the Republic of Baracoa has never given the impression of being exactly hostile to the Portiforo administration,” he remarked dryly.
The president frowned. “Are we to understand this as an insinuation against his good faith?”
“To be quite frank, Mr. President, I have never credited Mr. Throgmorton with a superabundance of good faith,” the attorney general replied. “I have known him for a long time—in fact, we were at college together, and—well, it would take more than his unsupported word to convince me that there is no truth in this startling story of Portiforo’s perfidy. He and the President of Baracoa are reputed to be close friends, and it is possible that his investigation might not be unbiased.”
“I protest against that remark,” the secretary of state exclaimed indignantly. “I, too, have known Mr. Throgmorton for a long time, and there isn’t a man living, Mr. President, in whose integrity I have greater confidence. If this hideous thing were true he would have told us so, no matter how amicably disposed he might be toward the Portiforo administration.”
The president nodded an acquiescence. “I have as much confidence in Throgmorton’s honesty as I have in his good judgment,” he declared. “As I said before, gentlemen, he is too conservative a man to have made such a positive denial unless he had good ground for doing so. I have felt all along that this rumor was nothing more than a concoction of Portiforo’s enemies; now I am sure of it.”
“And nothing would cause you to change your mind, Mr. President?” the attorney general inquired.
“I would not say that. I am always open to conviction. Of course, if you could bring me a photograph of Felix in a dungeon cell, I might be ready to believe that Portiforo has him in captivity. But even at that,” he added, a twinkle in his eyes, “I would have to be convinced that the snapshot was genuine.”
The attorney general smiled deprecatingly. “Then I’m afraid it will never be possible to convince you, Mr. President. I don’t imagine that there’s a photographer in all the world who could break into a South American dungeon, snapshot a prisoner, and get out again.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” put in the secretary of the interior. “I know of one man who might be able to accomplish even that remarkable feat. He’s a New York newspaper man named Hawley. He’s on the staff of the Sentinel. I met him some months ago, when I was in New York, and the experience I had with him then leads me to believe that there is scarcely any feat impossible of accomplishment where he is concerned.”