The check, always the same--for twelve hundred dollars--would have given him a good two weeks' whirl in highly-rated, expensive places, if he cared for splurge, but I guess he never was influenced much by regulation ratings. Any place he liked the looks of would do for him--and some perhaps that he didn't like the looks of. It was no use to try to tell the office force that Drislane hadn't a weak joint somewhere. Man, they _knew_! and holding no berths for the purely spiritual, with but one suspicious and unexplained action to work from, would build you up a character of any depth of depravity you were pleased to have. Three guesses, no more, was all they needed for Drislane's case. It was rum, or women, or rum _and_ women. If neither, then there was no hope for him at all--he was insane. And certainly his judgment in women was something fierce. I'm setting down now the diction, as well as the judgment, of the office force; this last judgment being based on the evidence of the two illuminated occasions when he had come in to cash his check, and each time brought with him a young woman. Naturally, on his departure, the lads in the office had a word to say. The only way they could account for his selections--well, they couldn't account for them. It must be a genius he had--something was born with him--to pick the homely ones. There wasn't the least evidence to show that there was anything wrong in these companionships of his. My notion of it was--he would never speak of it--that he picked up any kind of people in any kind of place, and made them as happy as he could while his money lasted. He certainly never went off for any two weeks' jamboree. Whatever his experiences were, they seemed to leave him in good shape physically, anyway. At least the marks of too many lonesome hours seemed to be ironed out of his face when he came back. The man was so everlastingly unconscious that he was different from anybody else that it was refreshing. But there was more than that--to me, at least. I always looked on him as a touchstone, one of those men by whom you may gauge other men. Drislane was sensitized to crooks. He had only to stand in the same room with them to get their moral pictures. If I heard of Drislane distrusting a man or of a man disliking Drislane, I would at once set that man down, knowing nothing of the man, as having a rotten spot in him somewhere. That was the Drislane who met me this night before the _Sirius_ and the _Orion_ were to sail for their last coal trip of the year, and asked me to have supper with him. And he took me to that same place where I'd had the words with Captain Oliver Sickles the day before--that is, the Tidewater Cafe--where was a drinking bar in front and a restaurant in back, a common enough sort of place, where women of the street could--and did--bring drunken sailors, and they served you pie with a knife.