“Do you remember me?” he said. “I met you once in a smoking-car in Texas. Well, I’ve got a story now that’s better than any you’ll find lying around here in New York. You want to go to a little bay called Puerto Cortez, on the eastern coast of Honduras, in Central America, and look over the exiled Louisiana State Lottery there. It used to be the biggest gambling concern in the world, but now it’s been banished to a single house on a mud-bank covered with palm-trees, and from there it reaches out all over the United States, and sucks in thousands and thousands of victims like a great octopus. You want to go there and write a story about it. Good-night,” he added; then he nodded again, with a smile, and walked across the room and disappeared into Broadway.
When a man that you have met once in a smoking-car interrupts you between courses to suggest that you are wasting your time in New York, and that you ought to go to a coral reef in Central America and write a story of an outlawed lottery, it naturally interests you, even if it does not spoil your dinner. It interested me, at least, so much that I went back to my rooms at once, and tried to find Puerto Cortez on the map; and later, when the cold weather set in, and the grass-plots in Madison Square turned into piled-up islands of snow, surrounded by seas of slippery asphalt, I remembered the palm-trees, and went South to investigate the exiled lottery. That is how this chapter and this book came to be written.
Every one who goes to any theatre in the United States may have read among the advertisements on the programme an oddly worded one which begins, “Conrad! Conrad! Conrad!” and which goes on to say that—
“In accepting the Presidency of the Honduras National Lottery Company (Louisiana State Lottery Company) I shall not surrender the Presidency of the Gulf Coast Ice and Manufacturing Company, of Bay St. Louis, Miss.
“Therefore address all proposals for supplies, machinery, etc., as well as all business communications, to
“PAUL CONRAD, Puerto Cortez, Honduras,
“Care Central America Express,
“Fort Tampa City,
“Florida, U. S. A.”
You have probably read this advertisement often, and enjoyed the naïve manner in which Mr. Conrad asks for correspondence on different subjects, especially on that relating to “all business communications,” and how at the same time he has so described his whereabouts that no letters so addressed would ever reach his far-away home in Puerto Cortez, but would be promptly stopped at Tampa, as he means that they should.
After my anonymous friend had told me of Puerto Cortez, I read of it on the programme with a keener interest, and Puerto Cortez became to me a harbor of much mysterious moment, of a certain dark significance, and of possible adventure. I remembered all that the lottery had been before the days of its banishment, and all that it had dared to be when, as a corporation legally chartered by the State of Louisiana, it had put its chain and collar upon legislatures and senators, judges and editors, when it had silenced the voice of the church and the pulpit by great gifts of money to charities and hospitals, so giving out in a lump sum with one hand what it had taken from the people in dollars and half-dollars, five hundred and six hundred fold, with the other. I remembered when its trade-mark, in open-faced type, “La. S. L.,” was as familiar in every newspaper in the United States as were the names of the papers themselves, when it had not been excommunicated by the postmaster-general, and it had not to hide its real purpose under a carefully worded paragraph in theatrical programmes or on “dodgers” or handbills that had an existence of a moment before they were swept out into the street, and which, as they were not sent through mails, were not worthy the notice of the federal government.
It was not so very long ago that it requires any effort to remember it. It is only a few years since the lottery held its drawings freely and with much pomp and circumstance in the Charles Theatre, and Generals Beauregard and Early presided at these ceremonies, selling the names they had made glorious in a lost cause to help a cause which was, for the lottery people at least, distinctly a winning one. For in those days the state lottery cleared above all expenses seven million dollars a year, and Generals Beauregard and Early drew incomes from it much larger than the government paid to the judges of the Supreme Court and the members of the cabinet who finally declared against the company and drove it into exile.