Free The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace

could not read the signature of Trinidad’s Grand Chancellor. One wonders if they could have read that of Talleyrand. He signed ‘Ch. Mau. Tal.’ with a flourish of flies’ legs on a window pane. He used no capital letters. Those of M. le Comte de la Boissière are fantastic and delicate.”
    When at the end of the second interview the Times man asked de la Boissière if he’d ever visited Trinidad, he replied: “No, thank you. I have other tigers to comb. We may take an indemnity from Great Britain, you know. It will be millions. You shall have a commission on the amount.”
    When these stories reached Harden-Hickey, he proclaimed that The New York Times would thereafter be his official news-organ. He awarded Managing Editor Henry Gary and Reporter Henri Pene du Bois each the Cross of Trinidad “destined to reward literature … and the human virtues”), and appointed each a Chevalier of the Court of Trinidad, which entitled them to wear uniforms identical with those of the chamberlains of the court and to receive pensions of 1,000 francs a year once the kingdom again became a going concern.
    Richard Harding Davis was the other newspaperman to handle the tottering principality with sympathy. Davis, who had been the model for Charles Dana Gibson’s handsome males, earned $100,000 a year writing first-person foreign news stories, plays, and novels. Many considered him a conceited, prudish clotheshorse. They may have been right. But beneath the chill exterior beat the warm heart of a romantic. To play king when there were no more kingdoms? To have one’s own toy island? Why not? Richard Harding Davis was an admiring vassal long before he reached the brownstone building on Thirty-sixth Street.
    “De la Boissière talked to me frankly and fondly of Prince James,” Davis wrote shortly afterwards. “Indeed, I never met any man who knew Harden-Hickey well, who did not speak of him with aggressive loyalty. If at his eccentricities they smiled, it was with the smile of affection. It was easy to see De la Boissière regarded him not only with the affection of a friend, but with the devotion of a true subject. In his manner he himself was courteous, gentle, and so distinguished that I felt as though I were enjoying, on intimate terms, an audience with one of the prime-ministers of Europe. And he, on his part, after the ridicule of the morning papers, to have anyone with outward seriousness accept his high office and his king, was, I believe, not ungrateful.”
    In San Francisco, Baron Harden-Hickey began to show signs of discouragement. His Foreign Minister’s formal protests and the tremendous publicity given these protests brought no response. Great Britain and Brazil continued their diplomatic dispute over Trinidad, and ignored King James I completely. If he read The Saturday Review for August 3, as most likely he did, he probably detected there the obituary of his reign. “The guano, the buried treasure, the innocent turtles basking on the sands under the watchful eye of the Zouave with the moustache and imperial, all have been swept abruptly into the rapacious maw of the British Empire.”
    In January 1896 the tug of war between Great Britain and Brazil was still raging when suddenly, the British garrison withdrew, surrendering its cable station and Trinidad itself to Brazil. The Brazilians, of course, had no use for the island; they just had not wanted English troops in the vicinity. Now they did not dare, after months of sound and fury, to hand the island over to an American adventurer. They agreed to retain possession of it on paper. It is unlikely that any Brazilian in his right mind was ever induced to spend a night on the island. As in the beginning, Trinidad again belonged to the turtles.
    Harden-Hickey had lost. In the past he had always been able to bounce back into some new project. But Trinidad had become an obsession. Letters of solace poured in, crackpot and legitimate, offering him partnership in various