ard. He placed it on the table again delicately and deliberately,
and wiped his grizzled moustache with a crimson silk handkerchief. He
put up his monocle, and seemed to be intently inspecting a gas globe over
the counter. I thought his grimace in this concentration came from an
effort to reinforce his will against all curiosity on our part. But it
appeared he was really looking at what showed, at an angle, of a portrait
on the wall of an inner room. He could just see it, from where he sat.
Anyhow, the landlord imagined it was the portrait which had caught his
friend's interest. "Looking at that crayon portrait, Doctor? Ah, showy
woman, isn't she? Used to be barmaid here. The Lord knows where she is
now. Went to sea, like a fool. Stewardess, or something worse. Much
more useful here."

The doctor's seamed face, sour and ironic, made it impossible to know
whether his expression was one of undisguised boredom, or only his show
of conventional politeness. I began to feel I had broken into the
intimacy of two men whose minds were dissimilar, but friendly through old
associations, and that the doctor's finer wit was reproving me for an
intrusion. So I rose, and asked indifferently what sort of a place was
Tabacol. Had he been there before?

"Never," said the doctor, "nor is it the kind of place one wishes to see
twice. We were kept at Tabacol because so many of our men were down with
fever. It is a little distance up the Pondurucu River . . . maybe two
hundred miles. Did you say. . . ? No. It is not really out of the way.
An ocean steamer calls at Tabacol once a month or six weeks. It is only
on the edge of what romantic people call the unknown."

It was evident he thought I could be one of the romantic. He looked at
me for the first time, twisting the cord of his eyeglass with his finger
and thumb in a fastidious way, and I thought his glance was to dissipate
some doubt he had that he ought to be speaking to me at all. He dropped
the cord suddenly as if letting go his reserve, and said slyly, with a
grave smile: "Perhaps the romantic think the unknown is worth looking
into because it may be better than what they know. At Tabacol I used to
think the unknown country beyond it looked even duller than usual. There
was a forest, a river, a silence, and it was either day or night. That
was all. If the voice of Nature is the voice of God. . . ."

The landlord was observing in surprise this conversation