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ir Roderick! Glad to see you safe home, sir," said Jephson. "Telegram just delivered at the Lodge for Mr. Collingwood." "For me?" said Jimmy. "I've backed nothing to-day. Been too busy." He tore upon the envelope, read the message, and after a pause handed it to me, whistling softly. It had been handed in at the Docks Station, Liverpool, and it ran-- "Tell O. that F. and I sail to-night New York S.S. _Emania_. "Foe." NIGHT THE TWELFTH. THE "EMANIA". I am going to spin the next stretch of this yarn--and maybe the next after it--in my own way. You will wonder how I happened by certain scraps of information: but you will understand before we come to the end. It comes mainly from later report, but partly from documents which I have been too busy, of late, to sift. Here they are, all mixed: and I choose one only out of the heap--and that a passage which doesn't help the actual story much, though it may help the understanding of it. It occurs in a letter of Foe's written at sea and posted from New York-- "She had been reading a magazine, borrowed from the ship's library, and when she left me, she left it lying beside her deck-chair. The wind ruffled its pages and threatened to tear them: so I picked the thing up, and was about to close it, and to stow it behind her cushion, when a story-title caught my eye and agreeably whetted my curiosity. It was 'The Head Hunter.' "I don't care greatly for short stories. Fiction as a rule bores me in inverse proportion to its length--which seems a paradox and liable to be reduced to the absurd by any moderately expert logician. Yet you will find it experimentally true of five readers out of six. . . . Moreover the yarn had little or nothing to do with real head-hunting--except in its preamble. I soon glanced at the end, and had no further use for the story. "But I turned my attention back to the preamble and reread it twice. The fellow, an American, has a queer cocky irregular style: but he can write when he chooses: and in one shot he so fairly hit me between wind and water that I had to steal the book, carry it down to my cabin and copy out the passage for your benefit. . . . Yes, for yours: because it conveys something I've been wanting you to understand about this chase of mine, something I co
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