" admitted Trask.

"Come up to our rooms and have tea," she said. "Then you get Dad
into a game of billiards, play as well as you can and--lose."

"A whale of an idea!" exclaimed Trask.

"And don't say anything more about the island," warned Marjorie.
"Dad's stubborn, but he's easy to handle. We'll act as if we didn't
care a whoop about this Dinshaw business--until we miss the
Thursday boat. Then we'll give him no rest. But remember, I'm for
the Thursday boat. That's just to throw him off his guard. He's a
dear old Dad, but sometimes he's balky."

CHAPTER III

CAPTAIN DINSHAW PULLS A LONG BOW

Below the customs house in Manila, close to the embankment of the
Pasig River, on the Binondo side, opposite Fort Santiago and the
Walled City, there is an ancient adobe building thatched with
_nipa_. Its narrow door opens on the waterfront. High and narrow
windows, devoid of glass or shell, are mere slits cut through the
walls. Seen from the river, they have a striking resemblance to the
gun-ports of an ancient battleship.

This place is known to sailormen the world over as "The Cuartel"
and probably takes its name from the fact that it was a sort of
block house used by the Spanish, to hold the approaches to the
river. It stands at the head of a narrow little street which twists
back into the native quarter of Tondo, and affords a haven for the
mixed population which labours on the Mole--coolies, seamen,
Chinese mess "boys," Tagalog _cargadores_, Lascar _serangs_,
stalwart Sikh watchmen from the hemp and sugar _godowns_, squat
Germans in white suits with pencils stuck in their sun helmets and
wearing amber-coloured spectacles. British clerks with cargo lists,
customs brokers, barking mates with blasphemous vocabularies,
Scotch mechanics with parched throats, and all the underlings who
have to do with ships and their freights.

Here they all gather for their tipple and gossip, easy at
friendships and quick at quarrels. They babble of things which
their employers would have kept secret, their tongues limbered by
drams from square-shouldered greenish bottles, Dutch as dykes,
which line the shelves behind the bar.

The Cuartel is owned by a black man from Batavia who calls himself
Vanderzee. His mother was a Kling. He was berth-deck cook of a
gunboat, by his own report, and "Jack o' the Dust" in a river
monitor up "China way." That's all anybody seems to know about him,
and it is suspected that he has his own rea