d again. Then he left for the teak forests. He had to live. He
came back in four months. In the meantime they had secretly
investigated. They offered him fifty thousand. _He_ laughed. He
wanted two hundred thousand. They advised him to raise cocoanuts.
What do you suppose he did then?"

"Got some other persons interested."

"Right-o! Some Americans in Rangoon said they'd take it over for two
hundred thousand. Something about the deal got into the newspapers.
The American oil men sent over a representative. That settled the
syndicate. What they could have originally purchased for ten thousand
they paid three hundred thousand."

"Splendid!" cried Elsa, clapping her hands. She could see it all, the
quiet determination of the man, the penury of the lean years, his
belief in himself and in what he had found, and the disinterested
loyalty of the servant. "Sometimes I wish I were a man and could do
things like that."

"Recollect that landing last night?"

Elsa's gesture signified that she was glad to be miles to the south of
it.

"Well, he wasn't above having his revenge. He made the syndicate come
up there. They wired asking why he couldn't come on to Rangoon. And
very frankly he gave his reasons. They came up on one boat and left on
another. They weren't very pleasant, but they bought his oil-lands.
He came aboard last night with a check for twenty thousand pounds and
two rupees in his pocket. The two rupees were all he had in this world
at the time they wrote him the check. Arabian night; what?"

"I am glad. I like pluck; I like endurance; I like to see the lone man
win against odds. Tell me, is he going back to America?"

"Ah, there's the weak part in the chain." The purser looked
diffidently at the deck floor. It would have been easy enough to
discuss the Warrington of yesterday, to offer an opinion as to his
past; but the Warrington of this morning was backed by twenty thousand
good English sovereigns; he was a different individual, a step beyond
the casual damnation of the mediocre. "He says he doesn't know what
his plans will be. Who knows? Perhaps some one ran away with his best
girl. I've known lots of them to wind up out here on that account."

"Is it a rule, then, that disappointed lovers fly hither, penniless?"

The mockery escaped the purser, who was a good fellow in his blundering
way. "Chaps gamble, you know. And this part of the world is full of
fleas and mosquitoes a