"Damned little!" was the profane and laconic rejoinder. They were men still in the early thirties. One was short and stocky, his face slightly pock-marked. Pictures of a mermaid and anchor clumsily tattooed in indigo on his wrist showed him to be a sailor. In fact, Dick Hickey, boatswain on _H. H. S. Tartar_, having taken French leave of his ship, as she lay in Cape Town Harbor, ran a very good chance of being taken back to England in irons as a deserter. Just now he was serenely indifferent as to what happened to him. Half dead from exposure and lack of nourishment, he would have gladly welcomed ship's officers or anybody else so long as there was some relief from his present sufferings. Meantime he spent what little breath he had left in cursing his hard luck, and blaming his companion as being solely responsible for his misfortune. The latter was some few years his senior, stalwart and clean-limbed. He appeared to be over six feet in height and a man of splendid physique. At first glance it was evident that he came of superior stock. His shapely hands were grimy, his eyes of a peculiarly light shade of blue were hollow and haggard looking. His face, emaciated and ghastly, was almost livid. A clean-cut chin was covered with several weeks' growth of beard. Yet, underneath all these repellant externals, there was in his every attitude that indefinable refinement of manner which the world always associates with a gentleman. His dark hair, disheveled and matted, was unusually thick and bushy, with the exception of one spot, in the center of his forehead, where there was a single white lock, a capillary phenomenon, which imparted at once to his face from its very unusualness an individuality quite its own.