When I found the _Medea_ it was late in the day, for she was not in the dry-dock that had been named. Her Chief had just gone ashore. There was a chance that he would have called at the _Negro Boy_, but he had not been seen there. Except for the landlord, who was at a table talking to a stranger, the saloon was empty. A silk hat was on the table before the stranger, beside a tankard, and the hat was surmounted by a pair of neatly folded kid gloves. "Come over here," said the landlord. "Sit here for a bit, Macandrew may come in. This is Dr. Maslin." A monocle fell its length of black cord from the doctor's eye, and he nodded to me. "The doctor used to be with me when I was running out East," explained the landlord. "Where did you say you had come from now, Doctor? Oh, yes, Tabacol. Funny name. I was never on the South American coast. After I left you sick at Macassar, the last trip we had together--the old _Siwalik_--I left the sea to younger men. But there you are, Doctor. Still at it. Why don't you give it up?" The doctor did not answer, except to make a bubbling noise in his tankard. He placed it on the table again delicately and deliberately, and wiped his grizzled moustache with a crimson silk handkerchief. He put up his monocle, and seemed to be intently inspecting a gas globe over the counter. I thought his grimace in this concentration came from an effort to reinforce his will against all curiosity on our part. But it appeared he was really looking at what showed, at an angle, of a portrait on the wall of an inner room. He could just see it, from where he sat. Anyhow, the landlord imagined it was the portrait which had caught his friend's interest. "Looking at that crayon portrait, Doctor? Ah, showy woman, isn't she? Used to be barmaid here. The Lord knows where she is now. Went to sea, like a fool. Stewardess, or something worse. Much more useful here." The doctor's seamed face, sour and ironic, made it impossible to know whether his expression was one of undisguised boredom, or only his show of conventional politeness. I began to feel I had broken into the intimacy of two men whose minds were dissimilar, but friendly through old associations, and that the doctor's finer wit was reproving me for an intrusion. So I rose, and asked indifferently what sort of a place was Tabacol. Had he been there before? "Never," said the doctor, "nor is it the kind of place one wishes to see twice. We were kept at Tabacol because so many of our men were down with fever. It is a little distance up the Pondurucu River . . . maybe two hundred miles. Did you say. . . ? No. It is not really out of the way. An ocean steamer calls at Tabacol once a month or six weeks. It is only on the edge of what romantic people call the unknown."