d, seeming to exude pleasure, "I will stay with you a
while, eh? Maybe we can teach him something--this cut-upping Tommy of
yours!"

He had fallen in with our scheme most agreeably, and later Tommy
confided to me that he was glad we wouldn't have to sit on the old
fellow's head.

Passing that afternoon beneath Morro Castle, the _Whim_ tacked prettily
through the entrance of Havana harbor and in another scant two miles
dropped anchor.

Havana Bay is a dancing sheet of water, as bright as the skies and
hardly less contagious than the city's laughter. But when one drops
anchor and then hoists it up, one recoils from the black and slimy mud
those blue waves hide; and this circumstance, slight as it may seem,
held a potent influence on our future.

Riding nearby was another yacht, in size and design very much like the
_Whim_, except that her rigging had an old-fashioned cut. Her masts were
checked with age and, where our craft showed polished brass, she long
ago had resorted to white paint. At the same time, she gave the
impression of aristocracy--broken-down aristocracy, if you choose. No
bunting fluttered at her masthead, no country's emblem waved over her
taffrail, and the only hint of nationality or ownership was a rather
badly painted word _Orchid_ on her name plate. Taken altogether, she was
rather difficult to place.

These signs of poverty would have passed unobserved by us, had we not in
coming to anchor swung between her moorings and the Machina wharf. Not
that it made any serious difference, Gates explained, nor were we
impertinently near, but it just missed being the scrupulously polite
thing to have done--and Gates was a stickler on matters of yacht
etiquette. So he felt uncomfortable about it, while at the same time
being reluctant to hoist anchor and foul our decks with the bottom of
Havana Bay. To be on the safe side he determined to megaphone apologies
and consult her wishes. Twice he hailed, receiving no answer. Two
sailors were seated forward playing cards--a surlier pair of ruffians
would have been hard to find--but neither of them so much as glanced up.

"Let the professor try in Spanish," Tommy said.

Monsieur took the megaphone and did so, but with no better success. Then
to our profound admiration he called in half a dozen languages; finally
growling: "Lascars, likely!"--and proceeded to hail in something he
afterwards explained was Lascar gibberish. All of which failed to
attract the surly p