ht of them all. The
carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he
could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty;
he was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass
tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean
gift in that direction) called "the gift of gab." He lived by writing
magazine articles. Also he wrote fiction, verse, and drama. Also he was
a painter. Also he was a musician. In short, he was an Irishman.

Artistically, he had all the perception of the Celt plus the acquired
sapience of the painter's training. If he could have existed in a
universe which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe
inhabited only by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablest
citizen; but he was utterly disqualified to live in a human world.
He was absolutely incapable of judging people. His tendency was to
underestimate men and to overestimate women. His life bore all the scars
inevitable to such an instinct. Women, in particular, had played ducks
and drakes with his career. Weakly chivalrous, mindlessly gallant, he
lacked the faculty of learning by experience--especially where the other
sex were concerned. "Predestined to be stung!" was, his first wife's
laconic comment on her ex-husband. She, for instance, was undoubtedly
the blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she had managed to
extract a ruinous alimony from him. Twice married and twice divorced,
he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muck raking
articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last unhappy
matrimonial venture.

Physically, Pete was the black type of Celt. The wild thatch of his
scrubbing-brush hair shone purple in the light. Scrape his face as he
would, the purple shadow of his beard seemed ingrained in his white
white skin. Black-browed and black-lashed, he had the luminous
blue-gray-green eyes of the colleen. There was a curious untamable
quality in his look that was the mixture of two mad strains, the
aloofness of the Celt and the aloofness of the genius.

Three weeks passed. The clear, warm-cool, lucid, sunny weather kept up.
The ocean flattened, gradually. Twice every twenty-four hours the tide
brought treasure; but it brought less and less every day. Occasionally
came a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster. But calloused
as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it with hasty
ceremony and forgo