Weeks after the rescue in Calcutta, these two soldiers of fortune, and another John Desmond, learned from the lips of the man himself that he was not such as they, but rich in this world's goods, richer than the Solomon of their discreet imagination. Shaken, battered, but sobered, he related portions of his life's story to them, and they guessed the rest, being men who had lived by correctly guessing for half the years of their adventurous lives. Like Brood they were Americans. But, unlike him, they had spent most of their lives in the deserts of time and had sown seeds which could never be reaped except in the form of narrative. Ever in pursuit of the elusive thing called luck, they had found it only in hairbreadth escapes from death, in the cunning avoidance of catastrophe, in devil-may-care leaps in the dark, in all the ways known to men who find the world too small. Never had luck served them on a golden platter. For twenty-five years and more these three men, Dawes, Riggs, and poor John Desmond, had thrashed through the world in quest of the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, only to find that the rainbow was for ever lifting, for ever shifting; yet they complained not. They throve on misfortune, they courted it along with the other things in life, and they were unhappy only when ill luck singled one of them out and spared the others. What Brood told them of his life brought the grim smile of appreciation to the lips of each. He had married a beautiful foreigner--an Austrian, they gathered--of excellent family, and had taken her to his home in New York City, a house in lower Fifth Avenue where his father and grandfather had lived before him. And that was the very house in which two of the wayfarers, after twenty years, now sat in rueful contemplation of a blue envelope. A baby boy came to the Broods in the second year of their wedded life, but before that there had come a man--a music-master, dreamy-eyed, handsome, Latin; a man who played upon the harp as only the angels are believed to play. In his delirious ravings Brood cursed this man and the wife he had stolen away from him; he reviled the baby boy, even denying him; he laughed with blood-curdling glee over the manner in which he had cast out the woman who had broken his heart and crushed his pride; he wailed in anguish over the mistake he had made in allowing the man to live that he might gloat in triumph. This much the three men who lifted him from hell were able to learn from lips that knew not what they said, and they were filled with pity. Later on, in a rational weakness, he told them more, and without curses. A deep, silent, steadfast bitterness succeeded the violent ravings. He became a wayfarer with them, quiet, dogged, fatal; where they went he also went; what they did so also did he.