"Judge of my amazement, as novelists say, when I recognized in Patterson none other than the author of all your troubles, your vanished brother-in-law—_Pendleton!_ "Will it surprise you to learn that my first emotion was a desire to rush upon him as he leaned across the bar and drive a knife into his back? "Instead, however, I got Mainwaring to introduce me and if Pendleton was surprised, he concealed it successfully. Presently he was drinking my liquor and chattering about the islands from which I am a recent arrival. If I disguised the cold rage I felt against the man you must give me credit for more diplomacy than you ordinarily do. "’You talk like a New Yorker,’ I presently let fall in a casual manner. "’Ah, there you have me!’ he threw out in a blandly mysterious sort of way. ’Truth is, I don’t know where I come from!’ "In short, he tried on the lapsed memory sort of thing. Woke up one day to find himself at Manila. Didn’t know his own name or who he was or whence. Initials on his linen were J.P. so he took the name of Patterson—as good as any other, and so forth. Very sad. But then one must take life as one finds it. Some of us are elected to martyrdom in this world. That, you understand, was his drift. "’Well,’ I told him calmly, ’if you really want to know who you are, I can tell you.’ "He turned, I thought, a shade paler, but he played his part smoothly. "’You don’t mean it!’ he exclaimed with a quite seraphic ecstasy. ’You know me! My God, man, you are my deliverer come at last!’ "’You are Jim Pendleton,’ I told him quietly and then I told him a few other things. My reasoning was like this: If he is the thorough hound I thought he was, he would have an excellent chance of bolting—and good riddance. If there was a shred of decency left in the man, now was the time for it to show. "Well, he surprised me. I saw real tears in his eyes. He begged for every detail I could give him. His voice broke when he tried to ask questions about Laura and the kids. He has not bolted. He is quite pathetically attached to me. I am dashed if I can tell whether it’s real or not. I don’t believe for a minute in the lapsed memory dodge, but I am flabbergasted. He seems so pitifully keen for every scrap I can tell him. Maybe the poor brute is really ashamed of his past and is trying only to save his face under this rigmarole of lost identity? He clings to me and I have him, so to speak, under observation. If it should even seem remotely possible to make a man of him again, don’t you think the risk of bringing him home might be worth taking? I don’t know, I don’t know. I shall use the best judgment I’ve got about me, but don’t for a moment think I’ll let you down. It’s your interest I’m thinking of and the interest of the kids.