We are concerned with only two of the numerous ship’s company. Strangers to each other and to all on board at the outset of the voyage, they had by this time formed rather an odd intimacy. Men of widely different types, it would be difficult to discover any natural bond of sympathy between Robert Brent and Duncan Fraser. The one an American, whose quiet, self-possessed bearing had in it that indescribable ease of manner which is the unfailing mark of thorough acquaintance with men and affairs in the best phases of _fin de siècle_ existence. The other a Scotchman, of rougher mold, more advanced in years, and whose natural keenness had been sharpened into an intuitive suspicion by much grinding against the unpolished side of human nature. Physically the two men were in marked contrast. It would have puzzled you to say whether or no the American had reached his thirtieth birthday. He was rather above the medium height, neither light nor dark, and of well-built, athletic frame. Few would have called him handsome, but his face combined strength, intelligence, and refinement, with a touch of something which at first you might have described as cynicism or melancholy. The Scotchman had evidently been a typical representative of his race. The large-boned, sturdy, close-knit body was well-preserved after fifty years spent, many of them, under suns less kind than those of his native moors and mountains. But the sandy complexion and almost flaxen hair had given place to a grizzled head and that peculiar deep-tanned, almost leathery skin which is always a record of whole chapters of adventure. The left cheek and tip of the left ear bore an index to some special record of violence. A furrow in the skin just over the high cheek-bone and a bit missing from the top of the ear immediately back of it seemed to mark the course of a bullet that had failed by the smallest margin in the accomplishment of a deadly mission.