"No!" rasped the lean man, and his eyes hardened like those of a cat with her claws out; "you figure it out, ma'am, in your own way very prettily, I don't deny. But my Pisgah-sight's got to be took, you bet. Guess we'll do th' view in a bunch, an' toss fur lots." Leah smiled vaguely, because she was not sure of her ground, and required a translator badly. Jim had been abstruse on occasions, but this seafaring person spoke the shibboleth of a shifting population to excess. Never having met one of this breed before, she did not know how to handle him. Captain Strange was not a Muscovite diplomatist, who would call black white, or even grey, to please her; and, moreover, he appeared to be extraordinarily unsympathetic in the presence of lovely woman. The magic of sex had worked weakly hitherto, and this brusque visitor gave her to understand that he was not to be cajoled into make-believe conversation. He required, and declared emphatically that he did require, an unvarnished statement of facts, to be argued exhaustively, so that he might know--as he tersely put it--where he dropped anchor. "You don't chuck orange-peel my way, ma'am," said the mariner, and intended to clinch his assertion by spitting. But the sight of the carpet pulled him back to civilisation. The friend of Demetrius, owner and captain of the _Stormy Petrel_, presented himself as a tall, small-boned man, with no superfluous flesh on his frame-work, and with a jaw as hard--from bullying underlings--and as blue--from close shaving--as were his eyes. The tint of these, added to the blackness of curling hair, combined with the racy vernacular which he flung fairly in her face, inclined Lady Jim to class him as an Irish-American. But from the discourteous way in which he spoke--as they never would have spoken in dear dirty Dublin--and from his habit of interjecting slang words chosen from the domestic speech of the Five Nations, she was puzzled to fix his nationality accurately. As a matter of private history, and this she discovered later, he was entirely cosmopolitan, and, out of sheer contrariety, owed allegiance to no particular flag. Not a bad-looking freebooter, Leah decided, with his regular features, and well-shaped head, and white teeth, and ruddy clean-shaven face; but dangerous, was her second and wiser thought. She was right. The man of many lands was also of many minds, but at the back of them all lay the unalterable determination to ride rough-shod over any one who would submit. As Lady Jim also held to the same theory of individualism, it was not unlikely that a brisk encounter might ensue, and for this she was quite prepared. Meantime, she decided that he was picturesque, and, in his rough blue clothes, with a red neck-tie and barbaric gold rings in his ears, and a general air of "you-be-damnedness," would have amused her as a new figure from the underworld, but that the large issues of the conversation induced seriousness.