ics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white shoes--all correct.
The hairy nondescript creature perched on their luggage in the bow had a
check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. He gazed in their direction from
forward in an expectant, trained-animal manner.

"You spoke to me first," said Schomberg in his manly tones. "You were
acquainted with my name. Where did you hear of me, gentlemen, may I
ask?"

"In Manila," answered the gentleman at large, readily. "From a man with
whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille."

"What man? I've no friends in Manila that I know of," wondered Schomberg
with a severe frown.

"I can't tell you his name. I've clean forgotten it; but don't you
worry. He was anything but a friend of yours. He called you all the
names he could think of. He said you set a lot of scandal going about
him once, somewhere--in Bangkok, I think. Yes, that's it. You were
running a table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't you?"

Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only throw
out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve
manner. A table d'hote? Yes, certainly. He always--for the sake of white
men. And here in this place, too? Yes, in this place, too.

"That's all right, then." The stranger turned his black, cavernous,
mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping
the brass tiller in a sweating palm. "Many people in the evening at your
place?"

Schomberg had recovered somewhat.

"Twenty covers or so, take one day with another," he answered feelingly,
as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive. "Ought to be more,
if only people would see that it's for their own good. Precious little
profit I get out of it. You are partial to tables d'hote, gentlemen?"

The new guest made answer that he liked a hotel where one could find
some local people in the evening. It was infernally dull otherwise. The
secretary, in sign of approval, emitted a grunt of astonishing ferocity,
as if proposing to himself to eat the local people. All this sounded
like a longish stay, thought Schomberg, satisfied under his grave air;
till, remembering the girl snatched away from him by the last guest who
had made a prolonged stay in his hotel, he ground his teeth so audibly
that the other two looked at him in wonder. The momentary convulsion
of his florid physiognomy seemed to strike them dumb. They exchanged a
quick glance. Presently the clean-shaven m