The young man did not show that he was either amused or surprised at the abruptness of the question, but answered me promptly, as a matter of course, and with minute detail. “You want to go to San Antonio,” he said, “and take the train to Laredo, on the Mexican boundary, and then change to the freight that leaves once a day to Corpus Christi, and get off at Pena station. Pena is only a water-tank, but you can hire a horse there and ride to the San Rosario Ranch. Captain Hardie is at Rosario with Troop G, Third Cavalry. They call him the Riding Captain, and if any one can show you all there is to see in this Garza outfit, he can.” The locomotive whistle sounded at that moment, the train bumped itself into a full stop at a station, and the young man rose. “Good-day,” he said, smiling pleasantly; “I get off here.” He was such an authoritative young man, and he had spoken in so explicit a manner, that I did as he had directed; and if the story that followed was not interesting, the fault was mine, and not that of my chance adviser. * * * * * A few months ago I was dining alone in Delmonico’s, when the same young man passed out through the room, and stopped on his way beside my table. “Do you remember me?” he said. “I met you once in a smoking-car in Texas. Well, I’ve got a story now that’s better than any you’ll find lying around here in New York. You want to go to a little bay called Puerto Cortez, on the eastern coast of Honduras, in Central America, and look over the exiled Louisiana State Lottery there. It used to be the biggest gambling concern in the world, but now it’s been banished to a single house on a mud-bank covered with palm-trees, and from there it reaches out all over the United States, and sucks in thousands and thousands of victims like a great octopus. You want to go there and write a story about it. Good-night,” he added; then he nodded again, with a smile, and walked across the room and disappeared into Broadway. When a man that you have met once in a smoking-car interrupts you between courses to suggest that you are wasting your time in New York, and that you ought to go to a coral reef in Central America and write a story of an outlawed lottery, it naturally interests you, even if it does not spoil your dinner. It interested me, at least, so much that I went back to my rooms at once, and tried to find Puerto Cortez on the map; and later, when the cold weather set in, and the grass-plots in Madison Square turned into piled-up islands of snow, surrounded by seas of slippery asphalt, I remembered the palm-trees, and went South to investigate the exiled lottery. That is how this chapter and this book came to be written. Every one who goes to any theatre in the United States may have read among the advertisements on the programme an oddly worded one which begins, “Conrad! Conrad! Conrad!” and which goes on to say that--