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This was a roll of plans concealed in a tin case the identical package which Mawkum had handed the "Bunch of Dried Garlic" months before, together with a document stamped, restamped and stamped again, containing an order in due form, signed "Carlos Onativia," for a lighthouse to be erected on the "Garra de Lobo" this last was in red ink with shipping directions, etc., etc.
Was the ivory-tinted gentleman going to build the lighthouse at his own expense out of loyalty to President Alvarez, the saviour of his country, and then donate it to the Government, using our estimate to prove the extent of his generosity? Or was there a trick somewhere? I decided to sound Senor Onativia the next morning, and find out. I had not long to wait.
The genial Scotchman broke out into a loud laugh. "Don't laugh! Listen!" I said to him. "Tell me, why didn't Garlicho go on with the work, and what do you know about Onativia?" Lawton leaned back in his chair and closed one eye in merriment. "Garlicho did not go on with the work, my dear friend, because he was breaking stone in the streets of San Juan with a ball and chain around his ankle.
Onativia lowered his chin, arched his eyebrows and looked at me over his glasses. "I don't want you to erect it," he said in a purring tone with a patronizing strain through it. "I'll do that. What I want to know is what it would cost HERE? That's what I came to New York to find out." "Has Senor Garlicho been awarded the contract?" I asked.
Onativia acknowledged my presence with a slight bob of his head, loosened the upper button of his coat, fished up a pair of glasses, stuck them on the knob end of his nose, and began devouring the plans in a way that showed both of us that it was not the first time he had looked over a set of blue-prints.
Next came a shirt-front soiled and crumpled, and then the rest of him in a suit of bombazine. "You designed a lighthouse some months ago for Mr. Garlicho, of San Juan," he blurted out with hardly an accent. "I arrived this morning by the Tampico. My name is Carlos Onativia." And he laid a thin, elongated piece of cardboard on Mawkum's desk.
Senor Garlicho, for some reason unknown to me, had waited until his option had expired and had then sent Onativia in his place. This wiped out the past and made a new deal necessary one which included the price of erection on the reef, a point which had not been raised in the former negotiation. "All right," I said, "you shall have the estimate.
When Paramba came back to power he was tried for high treason and condemned to be shot. He saved his neck by turning over the lighthouse papers to Onativia. As to Carlos Onativia, he is a product of the soil.
One part of the transaction we could never understand, and that was why Garlicho had allowed the matter to lapse if the lighthouse was needed so badly, and what were his reasons for sending Onativia to renew the negotiations instead of coming himself.
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