This view of himself was the one that he tried to give me. I probably
was the first decent man who ever had treated him civilly, and to
impress me with his knowledge he spread that knowledge before me. It was
_sale_, shocking, degrading.
At first I took comfort in the thought that Schnitzel was a liar. Later,
I began to wonder if all of it were a lie, and finally, in a way I could
not doubt, it was proved to me that the worst he charged was true.
The night I first began to believe him was the night we touched at
Cristobal, the last port in Valencia. In the most light-hearted manner
he had been accusing all concerned in the nitrate fight with every crime
known in Wall Street and in the dark reaches of the Congo River.
"But, I know him, Mr. Schnitzel," I said sternly. "He is incapable of
it. I went to college with him."
"I don't care whether he's a rah-rah boy or not," said Schnitzel, "I
know that's what he did when he was up the Orinoco after orchids, and if
the tribe had ever caught him they'd have crucified him. And I know
this, too: he made forty thousand dollars out of the Nitrate Company on
a ten-thousand-dollar job.
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