moustache of a cocktail mixer. We
know the eye and the moustache; we know that Smith of the luxurious
yacht, the gorgeous raiment, the mysterious mission, the magic
disappearance, has come again, though shorn of the accessories of his
former state.

At his third banana, the man with the nose glasses spat it from him
with a shudder.

"Deuce take all fruit!" he remarked, in a patrician tone of disgust.
"I lived for two years where these things grow. The memory of their
taste lingers with you. The oranges are not so bad. Just see if you
can gather a couple of them, O'Day, when the next broken crate comes
up."

"Did you live down with the monkeys?" asked the other, made tepidly
garrulous by the sunshine and the alleviating meal of juicy fruit. "I
was down there, once myself. But only for a few hours. That was when
I was with the Columbia Detective Agency. The monkey people did me
up. I'd have my job yet if it hadn't been for them. I'll tell you
about it.

"One day the chief sent a note around to the office that read: 'Send
O'Day here at once for a big piece of business.' I was the crack
detective of the agency at that time. They always handed me the big
jobs. The address the chief wrote from was down in the Wall Street
district.

"When I got there I found him in a private office with a lot of
directors who were looking pretty fuzzy. They stated the case. The
president of the Republic Insurance Company had skipped with about
a tenth of a million dollars in cash. The directors wanted him back
pretty bad, but they wanted the money worse. They said they needed
it. They had traced the old gent's movements to where he boarded a
tramp fruit steamer bound for South America that same morning with
his daughter and a big gripsack--all the family he had.

"One of the directors had his steam yacht coaled and with steam up,
ready for the trip; and he turned her over to me, cart blongsh. In
four hours I was on board of her, and hot on the trail of the fruit
tub. I had a pretty good idea where old Wahrfield--that was his name,
J. Churchill Wahrfield--would head for. At that time we had a treaty
with about every foreign country except Belgium and that banana
republic, Anchuria. There wasn't a photo of old Wahrfield to be
had in New York--he had been foxy there--but I had his description.
And besides, the lady with him would be a dead-give-away anywhere.
She was one of the high-flyers in Society--not the kind that have
their pictur