The following is a true capitulation of the casualties suffered by Mr. Copewell: one broken collar bone; one broken rib; one sprained ankle. Mr. Copewell was not a man of flimsy courage. In order to send a single reassuring word to the lady he loved, he would gladly have waded through blood, but one can not wade successfully through blood on one foot. He could not even walk along a railroad track on one foot. He tried hopping and found it, on the whole, an unsatisfactory means of locomotion. Then Mr. Copewell crawled back to his suit-case and sat down again in despair. Mr. Lewis Copewell was not astonished that his chance companion should, as it seemed, have abandoned him in his adversity. His meeting with Mr. Connors had been merely casual. Finding himself converted without warning from a voyager bound for the Enchanted Isles where a beauteous maiden awaited him into a wrecked and battered derelict, his course had drifted across that of a second derelict. The second derelict had stood by for a time and offered him some slight aid, then had drifted on, abandoning him to the mercy of winds and tides. As Mr. Copewell’s harrowed mind dwelt on the analogy of his shipwrecked life he realized that instead of being a friend this black-haired youth was in fact his Nemesis, his evil genius. In the waste places of the sea float dangerous, half-sunken craft that menace the traffic of the ocean lanes. Good ships bear down on these submerged hulks and yawning holes are driven into seaworthy prows. Such a drifting peril was the black-haired youth. But for him the train would have gone on uninterruptedly to Jaffa Junction, and the hope-laden argosy of Mr. Copewell’s existence would have made its happy port! But for this creature’s perfidy, Mr. Copewell himself would have remained by his fire and flagged the eastern train, at least establishing communication with the civilized world. So he might have snatched victory out of defeat. But now! Now there loomed before him only the ignominy and bitterness of a life spoiled in the making. In all maritime law it is meet and proper, when a sea-faring man encounters a drifting derelict, to destroy it. Mr. Copewell wished whole-heartedly for an opportunity to dispose of Mr. Connors. Yet, even as he brooded vengefully, Mr. Connors was parleying in his behalf with a clergyman’s wife, while a clergyman’s dog, of unchristian temper, licked his fangs beneath. CHAPTER VIII A PISTOL AND A PUNCTURE