Part 3

And so within five minutes after arriving in the mysterious harbor of Puerto Cortez I found myself at home under the roof of the outlawed lottery, and being particularly well treated by its representative, and feeling particularly uncomfortable in consequence. I was heartily sorry that I had not gone to the hotel. And so, after I had been in my room, I took pains to ascertain exactly what my position in the house might be, and whether or not, apart from the courtesy of Mr. Barross and his wife, for which no one could make return, I was on the same free footing that I would have been in a hotel. I was assured that I was regarded as a transient boarder, and that I was a patron rather than a guest; but as I did not yet feel at ease, I took courage, and explained to Mr. Barross that I was not a coffee-planter or a capitalist looking for a concession from the government, but that I was in Honduras to write of what I found there. Mr. Barross answered that he knew already why I was there from the New Orleans papers which had arrived in the boat with me, and seemed rather pleased than otherwise to have me about the house. This set my mind at rest, and though it may not possibly be of the least interest to the reader, it is of great importance to me that the same reader should understand that all which I write here of the lottery was told to me by the lottery people themselves, with the full knowledge that I was going to publish it. And later, when I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Duprez, the late editor of the _States_, in New Orleans, and then in Tegucigalpa, as representative of the lottery, I warned him in the presence of several of our friends to be careful, as I would probably make use of all he told me. To which he agreed, and continued answering questions for the rest of the evening. I may also add that I have taken care to verify the figures used here, for the reason that the lottery people are at such an obvious disadvantage in not being allowed by law to reply to what is said of them, nor to correct any mistake in any statements that may be made to their disadvantage.

I had never visited a hotel or a country-house as curious as the one presided over by Mr. Barross. It was entirely original in its decoration, unique in its sources of entertainment, and its business office, unlike most business offices, possessed a peculiar fascination. The stationery for the use of the patrons, and on which I wrote to innocent friends in the North, bore the letter-head of the Honduras Lottery Company; the pictures on the walls were framed groups of lottery tickets purchased in the past by Mr. Barross, which had _not_ drawn prizes; and the safe in which the guest might place his valuables contained a large canvas-bag sealed with red wax, and holding in prizes for the next drawing seventy-five thousand dollars.

Wherever you turned were evidences of the peculiar business that was being carried on under the roof that sheltered you, and outside in the garden stood another building, containing the printing-presses on which the lists of winning numbers were struck off before they were distributed broadcast about the world. But of more interest than all else was the long, sunshiny, empty room running the full length of the house, in which, on a platform at one end, were two immense wheels, one of glass and brass, and as transparent as a bowl of goldfish, and the other closely draped in a heavy canvas hood laced and strapped around it, and holding sealed and locked within its great bowels one hundred thousand paper tickets in one hundred thousand rubber tubes. In this atmosphere and with these surroundings my host and hostess lived their life of quiet conventional comfort--a life full of the lesser interests of every day, and lighted for others by their most gracious and kindly courtesy and hospitable good-will. When I sat at their table I was always conscious of the great wheels, showing through the open door from the room beyond like skeletons in a closet; but it was not so with my host, whose chief concern might be that our glasses should be filled, nor with my hostess, who presided at the head of the table--which means more than sitting there--with that dignity and charm which is peculiar to a Southern woman, and which made dining with her an affair of state, and not one of appetite.

I had come to see the working of a great gambling scheme, and I had anticipated that there might be some difficulty put in the way of my doing so; but if the lottery plant had been a cider-press in an orchard I could not have been more welcome to examine and to study it and to take it to pieces. It was not so much that they had nothing to conceal, or that now, while they are fighting for existence, they would rather risk being abused than not being mentioned at all. For they can fight abuse; they have had to do that for a long time. It is silence and oblivion that they fear now; the silence that means they are forgotten, that their arrogant glory has departed, that they are only a memory. They can fight those who fight them, but they cannot fight with people who, if they think of them at all, think of them as already dead and buried. It was neither of these reasons that gave me free admittance to the workings of the lottery; it was simply that to Mr. and Mrs. Barross the lottery was a religion; it was the greatest charitable organization of the age, and the purest philanthropist of modern times could not have more thoroughly believed in his good works than did Mrs. Barross believe that noble and generous benefits were being bestowed on mankind at every turn of the great wheel in her back parlor.

This showed itself in the admiration which she shares with her husband for the gentlemen of the company, and their coming once a month is an event of great moment to Mrs. Barross, who must find it dull sometimes, in spite of the great cool house, with its many rooms and broad porches, and gorgeous silk hangings over the beds, and the clean linen, and airy, sunlit dining-room. She is much more interested in telling the news that the gentlemen brought down with them when they last came than in the result of the drawing, and she recalls the compliments they paid her garden, but she cannot remember the number that drew the capital prize. It was interesting to find this big gambling scheme in the hands of two such simple, kindly people, and to see how commonplace it was to them, how much a matter of routine and of habit. They sang its praises if you wished to talk of it, but they were more deeply interested in the lesser affairs of their own household. And at one time we ceased discussing it to help try on the baby’s new boots that had just arrived on the steamer, and patted them on the place where the heel should have been to drive them on the extremities of two waving fat legs. We all admired the tassels which hung from them, and which the baby tried to pull off and put in his mouth. They were bronze boots with black buttons, and the first the baby had ever worn, and the event filled the home of the exiled lottery with intense excitement.

In the cool of the afternoon Mr. Barross sat on the broad porch rocking himself in a big bentwood chair and talked of the civil war, in which he had taken an active part, with that enthusiasm and detail with which only a Southerner speaks of it, not knowing that to this generation in the North it is history, and something of which one reads in books, and is not a topic of conversation of as fresh interest as the fall of Tammany or the Venezuela boundary dispute. And as we listened we watched Mrs. Barross moving about among her flowers with a sunshade above her white hair and holding her train in her hand, stopping to cut away a dead branch or to pluck a rose or to turn a bud away from the leaves so that it might feel the sun.

And inside, young Barross was going over the letters which had arrived with the morning’s steamer, emptying out the money that came with them on the table, filing them away, and noting them as carefully and as methodically as a bank clerk, and sealing up in return the little green and yellow tickets that were to go out all over the world, and which had been paid for by clerks on small salaries, laboring-men of large families, idle good-for-nothings, visionaries, born gamblers and ne’er-do-wells, and that multitude of others of this world who want something for nothing, and who trust that a turn of luck will accomplish for them what they are too listless and faint-hearted and lazy ever to accomplish for themselves. It would be an excellent thing for each of these gamblers if he could look in at the great wheel at Puerto Cortez, and see just what one hundred thousand tickets look like, and what chance his one atom of a ticket has of forcing its way to the top of that great mass at the exact moment that the capital prize rises to the surface in the other wheel. He could have seen it in the old days at the Charles Theatre, and he is as free as is any one to see it to-day at Puerto Cortez; but I should think it would be unfortunate for the lottery if any of its customers became too thorough a student of the doctrine of chances.

The room in which the drawings are held is about forty feet long, well lighted by many long, wide windows, and with the stage upon which the wheels stand blocking one end. It is unfurnished, except for the chairs and benches, upon which the natives or any chance or intentional visitors are welcome to sit and to watch the drawing. The larger wheel, which holds, when all the tickets are sold, the hopes of one hundred thousand people, is about six feet in diameter, with sides of heavy glass, bound together by a wooden tire two feet wide. This tire or rim is made of staves, formed like those of a hogshead, and in it is a door a foot square. After the tickets have been placed in their little rubber jackets and shovelled into the wheel, this door is locked with a padlock, and strips of paper are pasted across it and sealed at each end, and so it remains until the next drawing. One hundred thousand tickets in rubber tubes an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide take up a great deal of space, and make such an appreciable difference in the weight of the wheel that it requires the efforts of two men pulling on the handles at either side to even budge it. Another man and myself were quite satisfied when we had put our shoulders to it and had succeeded in turning it a foot or two. But it was interesting to watch the little black tubes with even that slow start go slipping and sliding down over the others, leaving the greater mass undisturbed and packed together at the bottom as a wave sweeps back the upper layer of pebbles on a beach. This wheel was manufactured by Jackson & Sharp, of Wilmington, Delaware. The other wheel is much smaller, and holds the prizes. It was made by John Robinson, of Baltimore.

Whenever there is a drawing, General W. L. Cabell, of Texas, and Colonel C. J. Villere, of Louisiana, who have taken the places of the late General Beauregard and of the late General Early, take their stand at different wheels, General Cabell at the large and Colonel Villere at the one holding the prizes. They open the doors which they had sealed up a month previous, and into each wheel a little Indian girl puts her hand and draws out a tube. The tube holding the ticket is handed to General Cabell, and the one holding the prize won is given to Colonel Villere, and they read the numbers aloud and the amount won six times, three times in Spanish and three times in English, on the principle probably of the man in the play who had only one line, and who spoke that twice, “so that the audience will know I am saying it.”

The two tickets are then handed to young Barross, who fastens them together with a rubber band and throws them into a basket for further reference. Three clerks with duplicate books keep tally of the numbers and of the prizes won. The drawing begins generally at six in the morning and lasts until ten, and then, everybody having been made rich, the philanthropists and generals and colonels and Indian girls--and, let us hope, the men who turned the wheel--go in to breakfast.

So far as I could see, the drawings are conducted with fairness. But with only 3434 prizes and 100,000 tickets the chances are so infinitesimal and the advantage to the company so enormous that honesty in manipulating the wheel ceases to be a virtue, and becomes the lottery’s only advertisement.

But what is most interesting about the lottery at present is not whether it is or it is not conducted fairly, but that it should exist at all; that its promoters should be willing to drag out such an existence at such a price and in so fallen a state. This becomes all the more remarkable because the men who control the lottery belong to a class which, as a rule, cares for the good opinion of its fellows, and is willing to sacrifice much to retain it. But the lottery people do not seem anxious for the good opinion of any one, and they have made such vast sums of money in the past, and they have made it so easily, that they cannot release their hold on the geese that are laying the golden eggs for them, even though they find themselves exiled and excommunicated by their own countrymen. If they were thimble-riggers or Confidence men in need of money their persistence would not appear so remarkable, but these gentlemen of the lottery are men of enormous wealth, their daughters are in what is called society in New Orleans and in New York, their sons are at the universities, and they themselves belong to those clubs most difficult of access. One would think that they had reached that point when they could say “we are rich enough now, and we can afford to spend the remainder of our lives in making ourselves respectable.” Becky Sharp is authority for the fact that it is easy to be respectable on as little as five hundred pounds a year, but these gentlemen, having many hundreds of thousands of pounds, are not even willing to make the effort. Two years ago, when, according to their own account, they were losing forty thousand dollars a month, and which, after all, is only what they once cleared in a day, and when they were being driven out of one country after another, like the cholera or any other disease, it seems strange that it never occurred to them to stop fighting, and to get into a better business while there was yet time.

Even the keeper of a roulette wheel has too much self-respect to continue turning when there is only one man playing against the table, and in comparison with him the scramble of the lottery company after the Honduranian tin dollar, and the scant savings of servant-girls and of brakesmen and negro barbers in the United States, is to me the most curious feature of this once great enterprise.

What a contrast it makes with those other days, when the Charles Theatre was filled from boxes to gallery with the “flower of Southern chivalry and beauty,” when the band played, and the major-generals proclaimed the result of the drawings. It is hard to take the lottery seriously, for the day when it was worthy of abuse has passed away. And, indeed, there are few men or measures so important as to deserve abuse, while there is no measure if it be for good so insignificant that it is not deserving the exertion of a good word or a line of praise and gratitude.

And only the emotion one can feel for the lottery now is the pity which you might have experienced for William M. Tweed when, as a fugitive from justice, he sat on the beach at Santiago de Cuba and watched a naked fisherman catch his breakfast for him beyond the first line of breakers, or that you might feel for Monte Carlo were it to be exiled to a fever-stricken island off the swampy coast of West Africa, or, to pay the lottery a very high compliment indeed, that which you give to that noble adventurer exiled to the Isle of Elba.

There was something almost pathetic to me in the sight of this great, arrogant gambling scheme, that had in its day brought the good name of a state into disrepute, that had boasted of the prices it paid for the honor of men, and that had robbed a whole nation willing to be robbed, spinning its wheel in a back room in a hot, half-barbarous country, and to an audience of gaping Indians and unwashed Honduranian generals. Sooner than fall as low as that it would seem to be better to fall altogether; to own that you are beaten, that the color has gone against you too often, and, like that honorable gambler and gentleman, Mr. John Oakhurst, who “struck a streak of bad luck, about the middle of February, 1864,” to put a pistol to your head, and go down as arrogantly and defiantly as you had lived.[A]

IN HONDURAS

I

TEGUCIGALPA is the odd name of the capital of the republic of Honduras, the least advanced of the republics of Central or South America.

Somerset had learned that there were no means of getting to this capital from either the Pacific Ocean on one side or from the Caribbean Sea on the other except on muleback, and we argued that while there were many mining-camps and military outposts and ranches situated a nine days’ ride from civilization, capitals at such a distance were rare, and for that reason might prove entertaining. Capitals at the mouths of great rivers and at the junction of many railway systems we knew, but a capital hidden away behind almost inaccessible mountains, like a monastery of the Greek Church, we had never seen. A door-mat in the front hall of a house is useful, and may even be ornamental, though it is never interesting; but if the door-mat be hidden away in the third-story back room it instantly assumes an importance and a value which it never could have attained in its proper sphere of usefulness.

Our ideas as to the characteristics of Honduras were very vague, and it is possible that we might never have seen Tegucigalpa had it not been for Colonel Charles Jeffs, whom we found apparently waiting for us at Puerto Cortez, and who, we still believe, had been stationed there by some guardian spirit to guide us in safety across the continent. Colonel Jeffs is a young American mining engineer from Minneapolis, and has lived in Honduras for the past eleven years. Some time ago he assisted Bogran, when that general was president, in one of the revolutions against him, and was made a colonel in consequence. So we called him our military attaché, and Griscom our naval attaché, because he was an officer of the Naval Brigade of Pennsylvania. Jeffs we found at Puerto Cortez. It was there that he first made himself known to us by telling our porters they had no right to rob us merely because we were gringos, and so saved us some dollars. He made us understand at the same time that it was as gringos, or foreigners, we were thereafter to be designated and disliked. We had no agreement with Jeffs, nor even what might be called an understanding. He had, as I have said, been intended by Providence to convey us across Honduras, and every one concerned in the outfit seemed to accept that act of kindly fate without question. We told him we were going to the capital, and were on pleasure bent, and he said he had business at the capital himself, and would like a few days’ shooting on the way, so we asked him to come with us and act as guide, philosopher, and friend, and he said, “The train starts at eight to-morrow morning for San Pedro Sula, where I will hire the mules.” And so it was settled, and we went off to get our things out of the custom-house with a sense of perfect confidence in our new acquaintance and of delightful freedom from all responsibility. And though, perhaps, it is not always best to put the entire charge of an excursion through an unknown country into the hands of the first kindly stranger whom you see sitting on a hotel porch on landing, we found that it worked admirably, and we depended on our military attaché so completely that we never pulled a cinch-strap or interviewed an ex-president without first asking his permission. I wish every traveller as kindly a guide and as good a friend.

The train to San Pedro Sula was made up of a rusty engine and three little cars, with no glass in the windows, and with seats too wide for one person, and not at all large enough for two. The natives made a great expedition of this journey, and piled the cramped seats with bananas and tortillas and old bottles filled with drinking-water. We carried no luncheons ourselves, but we had the greater advantage of them in that we were enjoying for the first time the most beautiful stretch of tropical swamp-land and jungle that we came across during our entire trip through Honduras. Sometimes the train moved through tunnels of palms as straight and as regular as the elms leading to an English country-house, and again through jungles where they grew in the most wonderful riot and disorder, so that their branches swept in through the car-windows and brushed the cinders from the roof. The jungle spread out within a few feet of the track on either side, and we peered into an impenetrable net-work of vines and creepers and mammoth ferns and cacti and giant trees covered with orchids, and so tall that one could only see their tops by looking up at them from the rear platform.

The railroad journey from Puerto Cortez to San Pedro Sula lasts four hours, but the distance is only thirty-seven miles. This was, until a short time ago, when the line was extended by a New York company, the only thirty-seven miles of railroad track in Honduras, and as it has given to the country a foreign debt of $27,992,850, the interest on which has not been paid since 1872, it would seem to be quite enough. About thirty years ago an interoceanic railroad was projected from Puerto Cortez to the Pacific coast, a distance of one hundred and forty-eight miles, but the railroad turned out to be a colossal swindle, and the government was left with this debt on its hands, an army of despoiled stockholders to satisfy, and only thirty-seven miles of bad road for itself. The road was to have been paid for at a certain rate per mile, and the men who mapped it out made it in consequence twice as long as it need to have been, and its curves and grades and turns would cause an honest engineer to weep with disapproval.