away the stump of his cigar, deliberately lighted another,
and leaned across the table towards me in a more confidential manner.

"Now we're coming to the more immediately interesting part of the
story," he said. "All that I've told you is, as it were, ancient
history. We'll get to more modern times, affairs of yesterday, so to
speak. After I cleared out of Blyth--with a certain amount of money in
my pocket--I knocked about the world a good deal, doing one thing and
another. I've been in every continent and in more sea-ports than I can
remember. I've taken a share in all sorts of queer transactions from
smuggling to slave-trading. I've been rolling in money in January and
shivering in rags in June. All that was far away, in strange quarters
of the world, for I never struck this country again until
comparatively recently. I could tell you enough to fill a dozen fat
volumes, but we'll cut all that out and get on to a certain time, now
some years ago, whereat, in Hong-Kong, I and the man you saw with me
this afternoon, who, if everybody had their own, is a genuine French
nobleman, came across those two particularly precious villains, the
brothers Noah and Salter Quick."

"Was that the first time of your meeting with them?" I asked. Now that
he was evidently bent on telling me his story, I, on my part, was bent
on getting out of him all that I could. "You'd never met them
before--anywhere?"

"Never seen nor heard of them before," he answered. "We met in a
certain house-of-call in Hong-Kong, much frequented by Englishmen and
Americans; we became friendly with them; we soon found out that they,
like ourselves, were adventurers, would-be pirates, buccaneers, ready
for any game; we found out, too, that they had money, and could
finance any desperate affair that was likely to pay handsomely. My
friend and I, at that time, were also in funds--we had just had a very
paying adventure in the Malay Archipelago, a bit of illicit trading,
and we had got to Hong-Kong on the look-out for another opportunity.
Once we had got thoroughly in with the Quicks, that was not long in
coming. The Quicks were as sharp as their name--they knew the sort of
men they wanted. And before long they took us into their confidence
and told us what they were after and what they wanted us to do, in
collaboration with them. They wanted to get hold of a ship, and to use
it for certain nefarious trading purposes in the China seas--they had
a plan by which the