sons for keeping a clove
hitch on his tongue about himself.

There are legends about fortunes which have been made out of bits
of news gleaned from conversations before the bar of the Cuartel.
The lampman of a Blackpool tramp remarked over his peg of rum that
his skipper liked smoked eels for breakfast and was taking on a
cargo of best steaming coal for Kamrangh Bay. This knowledge
enabled Togo to destroy the Baltic fleet in the Tushima Straits.
And a stevedore made something like a million dollars out of a
cargo of canned salmon by hearing some cockney give his theory
about how the blockade could be run to Port Arthur.

Vanderzee made some of his profits out of a little room at the far
end of his bar, where a man could sit hidden by tawny _tapa_
curtains rove on a bamboo pole, and have privacy while he heard
what was being said at the bar. The room had a marble-topped table
and two chairs.

Two men were inside of an afternoon, playing at cribbage. One was
short and heavily built, with powerful shoulders threatening to
break through the seams of his white drill jacket. His black hair
was clipped close to his skull, making his ears appear to stick
out amazingly. He had black moustaches which grew down over his
mouth, masking it. His face was brown and rough hewn. A straw hat,
curled up into a grotesque shape, lay at his feet like some
distorted bivalve. Its owner had an air of authority about him,
even a touch of dominance in the way he scanned his cards or moved
the pegs in the board. When his arm went out to the table, it moved
with a ponderous steadiness. His brown and hairy hand had the slow,
powerful sweep of a derrick-boom.

His companion was thin and angular, quick-eyed and nervous in his
movements, as though he moved on a gear of higher speed than his
opponent in the game. He crouched over the table when he shuffled
the cards or played them, without lifting his elbows from the
table, in the fashion of a jealous dog with a bone. He wore a blue
cap with a polished black visor, tilted back on his head, giving
him a rakish, devil-may-care aspect. His long and lean face, cut
with wrinkles, was twisted into a sly grin, as if he thought he had
the advantage of the other man.

The _tapa_ curtains were closed. The alcove was lighted from two of
the narrow windows, cut so high in the wall that they gave no view
of the Mole and the street outside unless a man were to climb on a
chair and get his shoulders on a level