Carefully packed, he figured it, one might crowd ten thousand cigars into each trunk. Ten thousand cigars, at eighty Mexican dollars a thousand, meant eighty pounds. Duty at one hundred and fifty per cent. _ad valorem_ on eighty pounds would mean a hundred and twenty pounds, or, as Fritz Vogel calculated, two thousand four hundred marks. Therefore, as the meditative trombonist further worked out the possibilities, his Excellency could, by simply loading up a few dozen more trunks with cigars at Hong-Kong and getting them passed free through the Customs at Yokohama--or at Nagasaki or Kobe for that matter--make more in a week than he could hope to earn in a month of Sundays by sticking to the thorny paths of diplomacy. Born west of the Suez, the fertile idea germinated in Vogel’s brain all through the dreary wastes of the Canal, and sprouted up green and vigorous, despite the withering blasts that pursued the liner down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to Colombo. At Singapore it had become an obsession. When steaming through the Narrows into the latter port, however, on the way to the German mail wharf, Vogel observed a red-funnelled Jardine liner at the Messageries wharf, with the blue-peter flying. An hour later the _Laisang_ left for China, carrying a hastily-written letter from Fritz Vogel to his friend Max Krebs at Hong-Kong. It contained a fair statement of the salient facts in the case, and a crude but lucid sketch of one of the pieces of baggage, together with a description of the scarlet bands and full measurements. It also stated what has not been set forth above--that each of his Excellency’s trunks was numbered in large white figures at each end and on the top, and it suggested that in the case of any person desiring to have access to those trunks whilst they were still on board the liner, Nos. 23, 24, 27, 32, etc., were the easiest to reach. Mr. Krebs was a “runner” for a native compradoring firm. He went out to the ships to “drum up” business for his employers, who supplied anything and everything that a ship could require, from cigarettes to engine-oil. In the old days before the Russian War Mr. Vogel had done a good deal of trade with Mr. Krebs on the short run between Yokohama and Hong-Kong. But the stringent Customs regulations that had ensued upon the increased tariffs imposed after the war had practically killed the business, save so far as concerned a paltry bit of trading with passengers in faked curios, and the occasional disposal of a few imitation gems to homeward-bound tourists when the vessel was west of Colombo. Opportunities like the return of an Ambassador to Japan did not occur once in a blue moon.