LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. =906= Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius A Devil of a Fellow and The Yellow Cat Wilbur Daniel Steele HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD, KANSAS Copyright, 1918, By Harper and Brothers Reprinted by Arrangement PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A DEVIL OF A FELLOW AND THE YELLOW CAT A DEVIL OF A FELLOW He had always been spoiled, by men, and especially by women. Even in the name they called him in Portuguese Old Harbor, down cape, there was a ring of irrepressible triumph--“Va Di! Va Di!”--as it were, “a devil of a fellow,” or “a gay bird.” They had been dead for more than half a year, he and Stiff Peter--dead, that is, in the knowledge of the home world. And as befitting one out of the unknown, he returned more magnificent than ever, stepping down the fruit steamer’s plank at the Boston dock dressed in a suit of cream-colored flannels gotten in the tropics, between which and the pale block of the Panama hat above, his face showed more than ever swarthy, rich-toned, and clean-drawn, with its crisp black spurs of mustache breaking the line of either cheek, like a brigand on a poster. In his right hand he poised a slender cane, something he had learned in Port au Prince. Stiff Peter came behind, carrying the new straw suitcase, clothed himself in much the same sort of shoddy in which he and his captain had been picked up from the fisherman’s wreckage, seven months before, by a southward-going tramp. Stiff Peter was a small fellow; he had to look up to Va Di; had he had to look down to Va Di the world would have been quite inexplicable. The pair stood outside the dock gates, staring about them at the heavy summer city, the venders of colored fruits, the hot blue Elevated trains thundering overhead, the ice-carts sweating long, cold threads across the cobbles. “Here’s the country fer you, eh, Peter?” Peter nodded, showing his bad teeth. “Betcha!” The master pointed the tips of his mustache and smiled easily at a passing shop-girl. “Say, Peter, I a’most wisht now I didn’t send that letter home. Be some sport, now, coming ashore into Old Harbor, like a--miracle.” “Betcha!” The little fellow grinned, thinking that would have been fine. “I wisht you didn’t, either,” he echoed. The fact that Peter himself had sent the letter, Va Di never having learned to read or write, did not obtrude itself upon either of them. Peter waited patiently, eyes on the cobbles. “Well, Peter, we’ll see a night afore we go down home, anyhow. Wonder who’ll be to Schlinsky’s? Them boys off the fleet’ll be tickled to see me.” “Betcha!”