being too tightly packed, and as Max prepared to change its
place, muttering, "Cheek of the fellow!" he could not help seeing two
photographs in silver frames lying on top of the bag's other contents.
Both portraits were of men. One was an officer in the uniform of the
French army, with the typical soldier look which gives likeness and kin
to fighting men in all races of the world. The other photograph Max
recognized at a glance as that of Richard Stanton, the explorer.

Queer, Max thought, as he lifted the bag, open as it was, to the upper
berth. Queer, that some little _bourgeois_ Frenchman, journeying
second-class from Marseilles to Algiers, should have as a treasure in
his hand-baggage the portrait of a celebrated and extremely pugnacious
Englishman who had got the newspapers down on him two or three years ago
for a wild interview he had given against the _entente cordiale_. Max
remembered it and the talk about it in the officers' mess at Fort
Ellsworth, just after he joined his regiment. However, the Frenchman's
photographs were his own business; and Max relented not at all toward
the cheeky brute because he had a portrait of the great Richard Stanton
in his bag. This was the sort of thing one had to expect when one
travelled second-class! A few weeks before he would have thought it
impossible as well as disgusting to bunk with a stranger whom he had
never seen; but as he said to himself, with a shrug of the shoulders
which tried to be Spartan, "Misfortune makes strange bedfellows." Max
was disciplining himself to put up with hardships of all sorts which
would probably become a part of everyday life. His own hand-luggage, a
suitcase with his name marked on it, had been dumped down by some
steward in the corridor, and he carried it into the stateroom himself,
pushing it far under the lower berth with a rather vicious kick. As rain
was falling in torrents, and a bitter wind blowing, he kept on his heavy
overcoat, and went out of the cabin leaving no trace of his ownership
there except the hidden suitcase. Perhaps on that kick which had sent it
out of sight the shaping of Max Doran's whole future life depended.

On the damp deck and in the dingy "salle" of the second-class Max
wondered, with stifled repulsion, which among the fat Germans,
hook-nosed Algerian Jews, dignified Arab merchants, and common-looking
Frenchmen, was to share his ridiculously small cabin. Most of them
appeared to be half sick already, in fearful