you with a chisel in two minutes. . . . But
you're right. Mahogany it is, and cuts like mahogany. . . . I keep a
high-class warehouse of stuff lower down-town, and there I'll show
you a log of it, seven-by-four. It's from Costa Rica. Would you
care to prospect? . . . I don't mind sharing secrets with the old
firm, as you always dealt with me honourably and we're both growing
old enough to remember old kindness."

"I'd make a holiday of it," said Farrell heartily, fingering the
wood. "Comes from Costa Rica, eh?"

"There's not much of it going, even there," said Renton.
"Not enough, I'm afraid, to start a fashionable craze. It was
brought to me, as a sample, by an enterprising skipper from Puerto
Limon, and I was going to send back a man with him, to prospect.
. . . But it's not detracting from his character to say that he
can't tell mahogany from walnut with his finger-tips in the dark--as
_you_ could, boss. If it's a holiday you want, with a trifle of high
cabinet-science thrown in, what about taking his place?"

"It's the loveliest stuff," said Farrell, rapt, fingering the wood
delicately.

"Well, now, that makes me feel good, having my old master's word for
it, that taught me all I know. Look at it sideways and catch the
tints under the light. 'Opaline mahogany' we'll call it.
Come down-town with me, and I'll show you the baulk of it. It don't
grow big. . . . What about cash?"

"I've a plenty for the present," Farrell assured him. "Clearing's my
only difficulty."

"You trust to me, and I'll oblige," said his old employee.

Farrell went back to his hotel that evening, paid his bill and walked
out with his grip. At Renton's warehouse in the lower town he
changed his dress for a workman's; was conveyed to the Quay by
Renton, who shipped him aboard the lime-tramp. She carried him down
to Puerto Limon; where the skipper took a holiday, and the pair
struck farther down the coast on mule-back for a hundred miles or so,
and then inland for the Mosquito village hard by which they were to
find the grove of this mysterious purple hardwood. They found it--as
Farrell had agreed with Renton in expecting--to be no forest,
scarcely even a grove, but a mere patch, and the timber a "sport"
though an exceedingly beautiful one. On their return to Limon
Farrell wrote out a careful report. The wood was priceless.
It deserved a new genius to design a new style of inlay for it.
Given that, with the very pink of ar