Part 3

And Louis Eppinger himself designed that dinner, and the Paymaster, and Perry's brother-officers, who were honored guests, still speak of it with awe; and the next week's Box of Curios said of it editorially: "And while our little Yokohama police know much of ju-jitsu, they found that they had still something to learn of the short jab to the jaw and the quick getaway."

Indeed, throughout, it was a most successful dinner.

And just to show how small this world is, and that "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform," at three o'clock that morning, when the dinner-party in rickshaws were rolling down the Bund, singing "We're Little White Mice Who Have Gone Astray," their voices carried across the Pacific, across the Cordilleras and the Caribbean Sea; and an old man in his cell, tossing and shivering with fever, smiled and sank to sleep; for in his dreams he had heard the scampering feet of the White Mice, and he had seen the gates of his prison-cell roll open.

* * * * *

The Forrester Construction Company did not get the contract to build the three light-houses. The Japanese preferred a light-house made by an English firm. They said it was cheaper. It was cheaper, because they bought the working plans from a draughtsman the English firm had discharged for drunkenness, and, by causing the revolving light to wink once instead of twice, dodged their own patent laws.

Mr. Forrester agreed with the English firm that the Japanese were "a wonderful little people," and then looked about for some one individual he could blame. Finding no one else, he blamed Roddy. The interview took place on the twenty-seventh story of the Forrester Building, in a room that overlooked the Brooklyn Bridge.

"You didn't fall down on the job," the fond parent was carefully explaining, "because you never were on the job. You didn't even start. It was thoughtful of you to bring back kimonos to mother and the girls. But the one you brought me does not entirely compensate me for the ninety thousand dollars you didn't bring back. I would like my friends to see me in a kimono with silk storks and purple wistarias down the front, but I feel I cannot afford to pay ninety thousand dollars for a bathrobe.

"Nor do I find," continued the irate parent coldly, "that the honor you did the company by disguising yourself as a stoker and helping the base-ball team of the Louisiana to win the pennant of the Asiatic Squadron, altogether reconciles us to the loss of a government contract. I have paid a good deal to have you taught mechanical engineering, and I should like to know how soon you expect to give me the interest on my money."

Roddy grinned sheepishly, and said he would begin at once, by taking his father out to lunch.

"Good!" said Forrester, Senior. "But before we go, Roddy, I want you to look over there to the Brooklyn side. Do you see pier number eleven--just south of the bridge? Yes? Then do you see a white steamer taking on supplies?"

Roddy, delighted at the change of subject, nodded.

"That ship," continued his father, "is sailing to Venezuela, where we have a concession from the government to build breakwaters and buoy the harbors and put up light-houses. We have been working there for two years and we've spent about two million dollars. And some day we hope to get our money. Sometimes," continued Mr. Forrester, "it is necessary to throw good money after bad. That is what we are doing in Venezuela."

"I don't understand," interrupted Roddy with polite interest.

"You are not expected to," said his father. "If you will kindly condescend to hold down the jobs I give you, you can safely leave the high finance of the company to your father."

"Quite so," said Roddy hastily. "Where shall we go to lunch?"

As though he had not heard him, Forrester, Senior, continued relentlessly: "To-morrow," he said, "you are sailing on that ship for Porto Cabello; we have just started a light-house at Porto Cabello, and are buoying the harbor. You are going for the F. C. C. You are an inspector."

Roddy groaned and sank into a chair.

"Go on," he commanded, "break it to me quick! What do I inspect?"

"You sit in the sun," said Mr. Forrester, "with a pencil, and every time our men empty a bag of cement into the ocean you make a mark. At the same time, if you are not an utter idiot and completely blind, you can't help but see how a light-house is set up. The company is having trouble in Venezuela, trouble in collecting its money. You might as well know that, because everybody in Venezuela will tell you so. But that's all you need to know. The other men working for the company down there will think, because you are my son, that you know more about what I'm doing in Venezuela than they do. Now, understand, you don't know anything, and I want you to say so. I want you to stick to your own job, and not mix up in anything that doesn't concern you. There will be nothing to distract you. McKildrick writes me that in Porto Cabello there are no tea-houses, no roads for automobiles, and, except for the fire-flies, all the white lights go out at nine o'clock.

"Now, Roddy," concluded Mr. Forrester warningly, "this is your chance, and it is the last chance for dinner in the dining-car, for you. If you fail the company, and by the company I mean myself, this time, you can ask Fred Sterry for a job on the waiters' nine at Palm Beach."

* * * * *

Like all the other great captains, Mr. Forrester succeeded through the work of his lieutenants. For him, in every part of the world, more especially in those parts of it in which the white man was but just feeling his way, they were at work.

In Siberia, in British East Africa, in Upper Burmah, engineers of the Forrester Construction Company had tamed, shackled and bridged great rivers. In the Soudan they had thrown up ramparts against the Nile. Along the coasts of South America they had cast the rays of the Forrester revolving light upon the face of the waters of both the South Atlantic and the Pacific.

They were of all ages, from the boys who had never before looked through a transit except across the college campus, to sun-tanned, fever-haunted veterans who, for many years, had fought Nature where she was most stubborn, petulant and cruel. They had seen a tidal-wave crumple up a breakwater which had cost them a half-year of labor, and slide it into the ocean. They had seen swollen rivers, drunk with the rains, trip bridges by the ankles and toss them on the banks, twisted and sprawling; they had seen a tropical hurricane overturn a half-finished light-house as gayly as a summer breeze upsets a rocking-chair; they had fought with wild beasts, they had fought with wild men, with Soudanese of the Desert, with Federated Sons of Labor, with Yaqui Indians, and they had seen cholera, sleeping-sickness and the white man's gin turn their compounds into pest-camps and crematories.

Of these things Mr. Forrester, in the twenty-seven-story Forrester sky-scraper, where gray-coated special policemen and elevator-starters touched their caps to him, had seen nothing. He regarded these misadventures by flood and field only as obstacles to his carrying out in the time stipulated a business contract. He accepted them patiently as he would a strike of the workmen on the apartment-house his firm was building on Fifty-ninth Street.

Sometimes, in order to better show the progress they were making, his engineers sent him from strange lands photographs of their work. At these, for a moment, he would glance curiously, at the pictures of naked, dark-skinned coolies in turbans, of elephants dragging iron girders, his iron girders; and perhaps he would wonder if the man in the muddy boots and the heavy sun hat was McKenzie. His interest went no further than that; his imagination was not stirred.

Sometimes McKenzie returned and, in evening dress, dined with him at his up-town club, or at a fashionable restaurant, where the senses of the engineer were stifled by the steam heat, the music and the scent of flowers; where, through a joyous mist of red candle-shades and golden champagne, he once more looked upon women of his own color. It was not under such conditions that Mr. Forrester could expect to know the real McKenzie. This was not the McKenzie who, two months before, was fighting death on a diet of fruit salts, and who, against the sun, wore a bath-towel down his spinal column. On such occasions Mr. Forrester wanted to know if, with native labor costing but a few yards of cotton and a bowl of rice, the new mechanical rivet-drivers were not an extravagance. How, he would ask, did salt water and a sweating temperature of one hundred and five degrees act upon the new anti-rust paint? That was what he wanted to know.

Once one of his young lieutenants, inspired by a marvellous dinner, called to him across the table: "You remember, sir, that light-house we put up in the Persian Gulf? The Consul at Aden told me, this last trip, that before that light was there the wrecks on the coast averaged fifteen a year and the deaths from drowning over a hundred. You will be glad to hear that since your light went up, three years ago, there have been only two wrecks and no deaths."