“No,” said Schomberg, very much surprised. “An alligator-hunter? Funny trade! Are you coming from Colombia, then?” “Yes, but I have been coming for a long time. I come from a good many places. I am travelling west, you see.” “For sport, perhaps?” suggested Schomberg. “Yes. Sort of sport. What do you say to chasing the sun?” “I see--a gentleman at large,” said Schomberg, watching a sailing canoe about to cross his bow, and ready to clear it by a touch of the helm. The other passenger made himself heard suddenly. “Hang these native craft! They always get in the way.” He was a muscular, short man with eyes that gleamed and blinked, a harsh voice, and a round, toneless, pock-marked face ornamented by a thin, dishevelled moustache, sticking out quaintly under the tip of a rigid nose. Schomberg made the reflection that there was nothing secretarial about him. Both he and his long, lank principal wore the usual white suit of the tropics, cork helmets, pipe-clayed white shoes--all correct. The hairy nondescript creature perched on their luggage in the bow had a check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. He gazed in their direction from forward in an expectant, trained-animal manner. “You spoke to me first,” said Schomberg in his manly tones. “You were acquainted with my name. Where did you hear of me, gentlemen, may I ask?” “In Manila,” answered the gentleman at large, readily. “From a man with whom I had a game of cards one evening in the Hotel Castille.” “What man? I've no friends in Manila that I know of,” wondered Schomberg with a severe frown. “I can't tell you his name. I've clean forgotten it; but don't you worry. He was anything but a friend of yours. He called you all the names he could think of. He said you set a lot of scandal going about him once, somewhere--in Bangkok, I think. Yes, that's it. You were running a table d'hote in Bangkok at one time, weren't you?” Schomberg, astounded by the turn of the information, could only throw out his chest more and exaggerate his austere Lieutenant-of-the-Reserve manner. A table d'hote? Yes, certainly. He always--for the sake of white men. And here in this place, too? Yes, in this place, too. “That's all right, then.” The stranger turned his black, cavernous, mesmerizing glance away from the bearded Schomberg, who sat gripping the brass tiller in a sweating palm. “Many people in the evening at your place?” Schomberg had recovered somewhat. “Twenty covers or so, take one day with another,” he answered feelingly, as befitted a subject on which he was sensitive. “Ought to be more, if only people would see that it's for their own good. Precious little profit I get out of it. You are partial to tables d'hote, gentlemen?”