their drinks. But if he meant to
share with them he would have to grovel. There was no help, and no
escape. None. For just then, with diabolic inspiration, Silva poured a
glass of sticky yellow liquor and put it out of his reach where the
drifting scent of it was a torment of Tantalus....

So he did what he had to do: untied his kerchief and the lorikeet's
little cage and spread out his few cheap odds and ends of juggler's
stuff--to try, as you might say, with the quickness of his hand to
deceive the eye of his fate.

In his usual program he counted one bit of conjuring which had earned
him many a step and many a tot of country spirits along his journey, and
which reasonably he could trust. He used on occasion to take up three
small beans, red and blue and black, and to take the lorikeet on the
same thumb; and with magic by-play he made to feed the bird three beans
and three and three again and so on, while the fluffy green mite still
plucked them from his finger tips and chattered in a manner absurdly
impudent and human.... It was an easy illusion. It had worked scores of
times. It began to work this time, startling the watchers with its quick
and graceful turn--even these. It ran on. It was winning. It might have
won him through: but the room and the lights were spinning about the
luckless magician like parts in a gigantic Catherine wheel--he sagged
forward on the table, his nimble fingers faltered--slipped; and quick as
a striking snake, Silva gripped him.

"Ah-ha! What did I say? Even at his own game--this liar--this dirty
tramp!"

The nature of the man loosed itself in a sudden, an insensate spurt of
fury, the complement of its accustomed dark restraint. He swept the poor
rubbish from the table. He snatched up the lorikeet and flung it down
and as the tiny thing flapped and screamed, broken-winged, stamped it
underfoot. He whirled Merry around by the elbows, so that all should
have an equal shot at him with fist or toe or billiard cue.

"This outcast!" he cried joyously. "What are we going to do with him?"

"Throw him out!" came the chorus. "Throw him out!"...

* * * * *

Of the next succeeding interval in Mr. Merry's pilgrimage, and his
particular progress that night, some slight record afterward survived
for a while. Not officially, of course. The witnesses were certain
nameless and unnameable residents of Zimballo's whose presence in the
colonial court would hardly have lo