"It's neither one nor the other," said I. "It's just the recollection of that boy fumbling under the table for his cap, and dragging himself silently out of the room, with all England to tramp and despair to sustain him." "That boy!" cried Clutterbuck, with great exasperation. "Curse you, Berkeley. That boy's a maggot, and has crept into your brains. We'll talk no more of him, if you please." He took a pack of cards from a corner cupboard, and, tossing them on the table, "Here, choose your game I'll play what you will, and for what stakes you will, so long as you hold your tongue." It was plain that I should learn nothing by pressing my curiosity upon him. I must go another way to work. But chance and Lieutenant Clutterbuck served my turn without any provocation from myself. I chose the game of picquet, and Clutterbuck shuffled and cut the cards; whereupon I dealt them. Clutterbuck looked at his hand fretfully, and then cried out: "I have no hand for picquet, but I have very good putt cards." I glanced through the cards I held. "Make it putt, then," said I. "I will wager what you will my hand is the better;" and Clutterbuck broke into a laugh and tossed his cards upon the table. "You have two kings and an ace," said he, "I know very well; but I have two kings and a deuce, and mine are the better." "It is a bite," said I. "And an ingenious one," he returned. "It was Cullen Mayle who taught it to us in the mess at Star Castle. For packing the cards or knapping the dice I never came across his equal. Yet we could never detect him, and in the end not a soul in the garrison would play with him for crooked pins." "Cullen Mayle," said I; "that was Adam's son." Clutterbuck had sunk into something of a reverie, and spoke rather to himself than to me. "They were the strangest pair," he continued; "you would never take them for father and son, and I myself was always amazed to think there was any relationship between them. I have seen them sitting side by side on the settle in the kitchen of the 'Palace Inn' at Tresco. Adam, an old bulky fellow, with a mulberry face and yellow angry eyes, and his great hands and feet twisted out of all belief. His stories were all of wild doings on the Guinea coast. Cullen, on the other hand, was a stripling with a soft face like a girl's, exquisite in his dress, urbane in his manners. He had a gentle word and an attentive ear for each newcomer to the fire, and a white protesting hand for the oaths with which Adam salted his speech. Yet they were both of the same vindictive, turbulent spirit, only Cullen was the more dangerous.