CHAPTER XII
THE CONSUL-GENERAL
Billy Senet's observations were always illuminating and sometimes very instructive. For instance, shortly after his installation in the Tangiers consulate, he wrote home to his sister:
This is a great place. You ought to see it. The city itself is the most beautiful spot on the footstool, I bet a red apple. It looks like a week's washing spread out to dry on a green, grassy bank—white and dazzling, you know; and it smells the worst ever; and it's as full as it can stick of the very purest, old-vatted Original Sin. It gets me, both going and coming. Tell the truth, I'd have trouble morning, noon and night, if it wasn't for a queer chap I've run across at the Hôtel d'Angleterre.
His name is O'Rourke—Colonel Terence O'Rourke—and he's the goods for mine. He's six foot or more of lean strength, straight as an Indian, brown as a berry, minds his own business, and, if half the yarns they spin about him are true, fears neither God, man, nor devil. I've taken the biggest kind of a shine to him, and he tolerates me, and helps me along with advice. Inasmuch as he's been all over, he's qualified to dispense the same to yours truly,
Senet was the very latest specimen of a Consul-General sent by the United States of America to Morocco, and he was young—excessively so—for a consul-general: a well-built man, with steady, brown eyes, an open-air look, and a faith in his fellow man that had been badly shaken since his arrival at Tangiers.
[ 305 ]
