Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/140

 though to fathom just how brightly the old-time fires of intelligence were burning there.

"What were you?" she was asking him, her note of frustration seeming to merge into one of distrust.

"I'll have to go back, away back, to make even that clear to you."

"Please do."

"Well, it was over five years ago that I first went to Peru, to look after the electrical equipment of the Pachita Water Power Corporation. They had to protect the forests on their power watersheds, so I wired their whole countryside and equipped their fire-rangers with portable telephones. That meant they could cut in anywhere and send for help in case of emergency. But a peon or a gaucho wouldn't stand for witchcraft like that, and the mandador sorrowfully intimated that I was too modern.

"So I next found myself in Nicaragua, with the task of superintending certain telegraph-construction work for Zelaya. When that was finished, for two years I was in the intelligence department of the Brazilian government, but the climate wasn't the sort that a white man could thrive on, and I had to give it up. Then, when the Masso Parra trouble first broke out Magoon invited me over to Pinar del Rio and