I looked at him with interest. I knew he had been as tickled as I by these astonishing friends of hers. "Revolooters," he called them. He was a great favorite with the girls. "I once knew a man in a business way who dealt in guns," he explained to Sue. "He shipped some to Bolivia from my dock. I'll have him up to meet your friend." So this messenger from the harbor, a keen lean man of business, gave one hour of his time to the problem in which the Russian dreamer had been absorbed for fifteen years. And the hour made the fifteen years look decidedly dreamy. "Guns for Russia, eh?" he said. "How'll you get 'em into your country? Where's your frontier weakest? You don't know? Then I'll tell you." And the man of business did. "Now what kind of guns do you want? You hadn't thought? Well, my friend, you want Mausers. They happen to be cheap just now in Vienna. You should have looked into that before you traipsed way over here. You can get 'em there for three twenty apiece--they dropped three cents last Tuesday." The dreamer dreamed hard and fast for a moment. "Then," he cried triumphantly, "wit' ten t'ousand dollairs I can buy over t'ree t'ousand guns!" The gunman's look was patient. "Don't you want to shoot 'em off?" he inquired. "Because if you do you'll need ammunition. You ought to have a thousand rounds, which will come to a little over three times the actual cost of the guns themselves. You see when you shoot off a gun at an army you want to have plenty of cartridges or else be ready to run like hell. "On second thought," he added, "I advise you to give up the Mausers and go in for Springfields over here--old ones--you can get 'em cheap. They're no good at over a mile, but for the first few months your fellahs will be lucky if they hit a man at a hundred yards. And there's one good point about Springfields, they make a devil of a noise--and that's all you need for a starter, noise enough to break into headlines all over the world as a 'Brave Little Rebel Army.' If you can do that, and the word goes around on the quiet that you're using American rifles--well, there's a kind of a sentiment in our trade--you'll find us all behind you. We'll even _lose_ money. We're a queer bunch." "But wait!" cried the Russian. "Dere ees a trouble! Your tr-reaty wit' Russia! Have you not a tr-reaty which makes it forbidden to sell to me guns?" Again that look of patience: