Billy’s title was Directeur General et Inspecteur Municipal de Luminaire Electrique, which is some title, and his salary was fifty dollars a week.  In spite of Billy’s color President Ham always treated his only white official with courtesy and gave him his full title.  About giving him his full salary he was less particular.  This neglect greatly annoyed Billy.  He came of sturdy New England stock and possessed that New England conscience which makes the owner a torment to himself, and to every one else a nuisance.  Like all the other Barlows of Barnstable on Cape Cod, Billy had worked for his every penny.  He was no shirker.  From the first day that he carried a pair of pliers in the leg pocket of his overalls, and in a sixty-knot gale stretched wires between ice-capped telegraph poles, he had more than earned his wages.  Never, whether on time or at piece-work, had he by a slovenly job, or by beating the whistle, robbed his employer.  And for his honest toil he was determined to be as honestly paid—­even by President Hamilcar Poussevain.  And President Ham never paid anybody; neither the Armenian street peddlers, in whose sweets he delighted, nor the Bethlehem Steel Company, nor the house of Rothschild.

Why he paid Billy even the small sums that from time to time Billy wrung from the president’s strong box the foreign colony were at a loss to explain.  Wagner, the new American consul, asked Billy how he managed it.  As an American minister had not yet been appointed, to the duties of the consul, as Wagner assured everybody, were added those of diplomacy.  But Haytian diplomacy he had yet to master.  At the seaport in Scotland where he had served as vice-consul, law and order were as solidly established as the stone jetties, and by contrast the eccentricities of the Black Republic baffled and distressed him.

“It can’t be that you blackmail the president,” said the consul, “because I understand he boasts he has committed all the known crimes.”

“And several he invented,” agreed Billy.

“And you can’t do it with a gun, because they tell me the president isn’t afraid of anything except a voodoo priestess.  What is your secret?” coaxed the consul.  “If you’ll only sell it, I know several Powers that would give you your price.”

Billy smiled modestly.

“It’s very simple,” he said.  “The first time my wages were shy I went to the palace and told him if he didn’t come across I’d shut off the juice.  I think he was so stunned at anybody asking him for real money that while he was still stunned he opened his safe and handed me two thousand francs.  I think he did it more in admiration for my nerve than because he owed it.  The next time pay-day arrived, and the pay did not, I didn’t go to the palace.  I just went to bed, and the lights went to bed, too.  You may remember?”

The consul snorted indignantly.

“I was holding three queens at the time,” he protested.  “Was it you did that?”