Following others who slipped down the stairs in the single, levelling garment, Admeh went across the main salon, through a double glass door, and into an ante-chamber considerably hotter, where men were lolling back, wet and shiny, in canvas chairs. He saw the rubbers working in the room beyond, saw that the men under their hands were black and brown of hair and beard. To the right, another glass door caught his eye. He passed in and gasped at the heavy, overpowering temperature. His glasses, to which he had clung with the instinct of a near-sighted man, burned on his nose. Men, glistening and dripping, sat all along the wall, their feet in little tubs of water. In the corner sat the mysterious stranger of the yellow hair and beard. He was singing sentimentally. Admeh, practised in the lore of intoxication, watched him. “The jag’s growing,” he said to himself. In fact, the fumes of liquor, heat driven, were mounting steadily. Crossing the room, so as to command the stranger’s right side, he saw round his upper arm a black rubber bandage, like those used to confine varicose veins. The problem resolved itself into a question of tearing off that bandage. “Hotter’n the hazes of the Philippines!” babbled the man with the yellow beard. Piecing together the description of her husband given by Maxie in the story of her adventures, Admeh was more than ever persuaded that this was the object of his search, that under the elastic bandage was the mark of identification by which he was to know the legatee of the fortune left by the old bell-ringer. The man of the yellow beard sang maudlin Orpheum songs and prattled of many things. He cursed San Francisco. He told of his amours. He offered to fight or wrestle with anyone in the room. “A chance,” thought Admeh, as he took the challenge. But in a moment more, the drunken man was running again on a love-tack, with the winds of imagination blowing free. Nevertheless, this challenge gave Admeh an idea. What he could not encompass by diplomacy he might seize by force. In that method, all must depend upon the issue of a moment. If he could tear away the bandage in the first dash he would win. But let the struggle last more than a moment and others would intervene; then he would be thrown out and the chance would be gone. Mentally he measured bodies against the stranger; man for man he saw that, both being sober, he himself was badly over-matched. Broader and taller by many inches, the stranger was of thick, knotty limbs, and deep chest; Admeh himself was all cowboy nerve and wire, but slight and out of condition. It was bull against coyote. “The question is,” thought Admeh, “can I and his jag lick him and his muscle?”