American market and whom any one could
engage to work in any part of the world for twenty francs a day and
their expenses. Yes, those Italian workmen were clever fellows,
Logotheti admitted. But everything could be counterfeited now, as
everybody knew, and his only merit lay in having ordered this
particular counterfeit instead of having been deceived by it.

As Logotheti sat there in the quiet light, looking at it, the word
'copy' sounded in his memory, as he had often spoken it, and a peaceful
smile played upon his broad Oriental lips. The 'copy' had cost human
lives, and he had almost paid for it with his own, in his haste to have
it for himself, and only for himself.

His eyes were half-closed again, and he saw outlines of strong ragged
men staggering down to a lonely cove at night, with their marble
burden, and he heard the autumn gale howling among the rocks, and the
soft thud of the baled statue as it was laid in the bottom of the
little fishing craft; and then, because the men feared the weather, he
was in the boat himself, shaming them by his courage, loosing the sail,
bending furiously to one of the long sweeps, yelling, cheering,
cursing, promising endless gold, then baling with mad energy as the
water swirled up and poured over the canvas bulwark that Greek boats
carry, and still wildly urging the fishermen to keep her up; and then,
the end, a sweep broken and foul of the next, a rower falling headlong
on the man in front of him, confusion in the dark, the crazy boat
broached to in the breaking sea, filling, fuller, now quite full and
sinking, the raging hell of men fighting for their lives amongst broken
oars, and tangled rigging and floating bottom-boards; one voice less,
two less, a smashing sea and then no voices at all, no boat, no men, no
anything but the howling wind and the driving spray, and he himself,
Logotheti, gripping a spar, one of those long booms the fishermen carry
for running, half-drowned again and again, but gripping still, and
drifting with the storm past the awful death of sharp black rocks and
pounding seas, into the calm lee beyond.

And then, a week later, on a still October night, his great yacht lying
where the boat had sunk, with diver and crane and hoisting gear, and
submarine light; and at last, the thing itself brought up from ten
fathoms deep with noise of chain and steam winch, and swung in on deck,
the water-worn baling dropping from it and soon torn off, to show the
pr