“Listen,” Webster urged him, and Mr. Tolliver helped himself to a fresh bite of chewing-tobacco and inclined his head. Briefly, but without omitting a single important detail, Webster told the consul of his adventure in New Orleans with the secret service representative of the Republic of Sobrante. “And not an hour since,” he concluded, “I was informed, through a source I consider reliable, that I am in momentary danger of assassination at the hands of two men whose names I know.”
“Well, don't tell me nothin' about it,” Mr. Tolliver interrupted. “I'm here on Government affairs, not to straighten out private quarrels. If you're figurin' on gittin' killed, my advice to you is to git out o' the country P. D. Q.”
“You overlook the fact that I didn't come here for advice, my dear Mr. Consul,” Webster reminded him with some asperity. “I'm not at all afraid of getting killed. What is worrying me is the certainty that I'll get there first with the most guns, and if I should, in self-defense, be forced to eliminate two Sobrantean army officers, I want to know what you're going to do to protect me. I want to make an affidavit that my life is in danger; I want my witness to make a similar affidavit, and I want to file those affidavits with you, to be adduced as evidence to support my plea of selfdefense. In other words, I want to have these affidavits, with the power of the United States back of them, to spring in case the Sobrantean government tries to railroad me for murder—and I want you to spring them for me.”
“I won't do nothin' o' the kind,” Mr. Tolliver declared bluntly. “You got plenty o' chance to get out o' this country an' save international complications. La Estrellita pulls out to-morrow mornin', an' you pull with her, or stay an' take your own chances. I ain't prejudicin' my job by makin' myself nux vomica to the Sobrantean government—an' that's just what will happen if I mix up in this private quarrel.”
“But, my dear Mr. Consul, I am going into business here—the mining business. I have every right in this country, and it is your duty to protect my rights while here. I can't side-step a fight just to hold you in your job.”
“It's a matter outside my jurisdiction,” Mr. Tolliver declared with such a note of finality in his voice that Webster saw the uselessness of further argument.
“All right,” he replied, holding his temper as best he could. “I'm glad to know you think so much of your job. I may live long enough to find an opportunity to kick you out of it and run this consulate myself. I'll send my affidavits direct to the State department at Washington; you take orders from Washington, I dare say.”
“When I get them. Good day.”
John Stuart Webster left the American consulate in a frenzy of inarticulate rage in the knowledge that he was an American and represented in Sobrante by such an invertebrate as the Honourable Lemuel Tolliver. At the Hotel Mateo he dismissed the carriage, climbed the three short steps to the entrance and was passing through the revolving portal, when from his rear some one gave the door a violent shove, with the result that the turnstile partition behind him collided with his back with sufficient force to throw him against the partition in front. Instantly the door ceased to pivot, with Webster locked neatly in the triangular space between the two sections of the revolving door and the jamb.
He turned and beheld in the section behind him an officer of the Sobrantean army. This individual, observing he was under Webster's scrutiny, scowled and peremptorily motioned to Webster to proceed—which the latter did, with such violence that the door, continuing to revolve, caught up with the Sobrantean and subjected him to the same indignity to which he had subjected Webster.