nything wrong in
these companionships of his. My notion of it was--he would never speak
of it--that he picked up any kind of people in any kind of place, and
made them as happy as he could while his money lasted. He certainly
never went off for any two weeks' jamboree. Whatever his experiences
were, they seemed to leave him in good shape physically, anyway. At
least the marks of too many lonesome hours seemed to be ironed out of
his face when he came back.

The man was so everlastingly unconscious that he was different from
anybody else that it was refreshing. But there was more than that--to
me, at least. I always looked on him as a touchstone, one of those men
by whom you may gauge other men. Drislane was sensitized to crooks. He
had only to stand in the same room with them to get their moral
pictures. If I heard of Drislane distrusting a man or of a man disliking
Drislane, I would at once set that man down, knowing nothing of the man,
as having a rotten spot in him somewhere.

That was the Drislane who met me this night before the _Sirius_ and the
_Orion_ were to sail for their last coal trip of the year, and asked me
to have supper with him. And he took me to that same place where I'd had
the words with Captain Oliver Sickles the day before--that is, the
Tidewater Cafe--where was a drinking bar in front and a restaurant in
back, a common enough sort of place, where women of the street
could--and did--bring drunken sailors, and they served you pie with a
knife.

I speak of that item of serving pie with a knife, not by way of poking
fun at anybody; but here was a man five years away from his inland
hills, for a whole year owner of an eating-place in a good-sized
seaport city, and had not yet noticed that some people ate pie without a
knife. By it I fancied I could gauge the man's social inheritance. And
there were other customs of the place in keeping with the pie and knife.
I used to speculate on what primitive sort of an upbringing he had that
he was so slow to adopt the most ordinary civilized customs.

Drislane seemed to be at home in the place. So was I for that matter; by
which I mean I felt safe enough. Several times before this, in my
inquisitive ramblings about the port, I had looked in there. So far as
that goes, there are not many places where they bother a man who doesn't
bother them, always excepting, of course, that he doesn't get drunk and
disorderly, and isn't naturally foolish.

While I was stud