because there's a man at the King Edward he can beat at billiards."

"What's that got to do with it?" asked Trask, vaguely.

"You're a regular man!" she retorted. "Can't you see? Can you play billiards?"

"A little," admitted Trask.

"Come up to our rooms and have tea," she said. "Then you get Dad into a game of billiards, play as well as you can and—lose."

"A whale of an idea!" exclaimed Trask.

"And don't say anything more about the island," warned Marjorie. "Dad's stubborn, but he's easy to handle. We'll act as if we didn't care a whoop about this Dinshaw business—until we miss the Thursday boat. Then we'll give him no rest. But remember, I'm for the Thursday boat. That's just to throw him off his guard. He's a dear old Dad, but sometimes he's balky."

CHAPTER III

Captain Dinshaw Pulls a Long Bow

Below the customs house in Manila, close to the embankment of the Pasig River, on the Binondo side, opposite Fort Santiago and the Walled City, there is an ancient adobe building thatched with nipa. Its narrow door opens on the waterfront. High and narrow windows, devoid of glass or shell, are mere slits cut through the walls. Seen from the river, they have a striking resemblance to the gun-ports of an ancient battleship.

This place is known to sailormen the world over as "The Cuartel" and probably takes its name from the fact that it was a sort of block house used by the Spanish, to hold the approaches to the river. It stands at the head of a narrow little street which twists back into the native quarter of Tondo, and affords a haven for the mixed population which labours on the Mole—coolies, seamen, Chinese mess "boys," Tagalog cargadores, Lascar serangs, stalwart Sikh watchmen from the hemp and sugar godowns, squat Germans in white suits with pencils stuck in their sun helmets and wearing amber-coloured spectacles. British clerks with cargo lists, customs brokers, barking mates with blasphemous vocabularies, Scotch mechanics with parched throats, and all the underlings who have to do with ships and their freights.

Here they all gather for their tipple and gossip, easy at friendships and quick at quarrels. They babble of things which their employers would have kept secret, their tongues limbered by drams from square-shouldered greenish bottles, Dutch as dykes, which line the shelves behind the bar.

The Cuartel is owned by a black man from Batavia who calls himself Vanderzee. His mother was a Kling. He was berth-deck cook of a gunboat, by his own report, and "Jack o' the Dust" in a river monitor up "China way." That's all anybody seems to know about him, and it is suspected that he has his own reasons for keeping a clove hitch on his tongue about himself.

There are legends about fortunes which have been made out of bits of news gleaned from conversations before the bar of the Cuartel. The lampman of a Blackpool tramp remarked over his peg of rum that his skipper liked smoked eels for breakfast and was taking on a cargo of best steaming coal for Kamrangh Bay. This knowledge enabled Togo to destroy the Baltic fleet in the Tushima Straits. And a stevedore made something like a million dollars out of a cargo of canned salmon by hearing some cockney give his theory about how the blockade could be run to Port Arthur.

Vanderzee made some of his profits out of a little room at the far end of his bar, where a man could sit hidden by tawny tapa curtains rove on a bamboo pole, and have privacy while he heard what was being said at the bar. The room had a marble-topped table and two chairs.

Two men were inside of an afternoon, playing at cribbage. One was short and heavily built, with powerful shoulders threatening to break through the seams of his white drill jacket. His black hair was clipped close to his skull, making his ears appear to stick out amazingly. He had black moustaches which grew down over his mouth, masking it. His face was brown and rough hewn. A straw hat, curled up into a grotesque shape, lay at his feet like some distorted bivalve. Its owner had an air of authority about him, even a touch of dominance in the way he scanned his cards or moved the pegs in the board. When his arm went out to the table, it moved with a ponderous steadiness. His brown and hairy hand had the slow, powerful sweep of a derrick-boom.

His companion was thin and angular, quick-eyed and nervous in his movements, as though he moved on a gear of higher speed than his opponent in the game. He crouched over the table when he shuffled the cards or played them, without lifting his elbows from the table, in the fashion of a jealous dog with a bone. He wore a blue cap with a polished black visor, tilted back on his head, giving him a rakish, devil-may-care aspect. His long and lean face, cut with wrinkles, was twisted into a sly grin, as if he thought he had the advantage of the other man.

The tapa curtains were closed. The alcove was lighted from two of the narrow windows, cut so high in the wall that they gave no view of the Mole and the street outside unless a man were to climb on a chair and get his shoulders on a level with the bamboo rafters, where the tiny lizards prowled in the dust and hunted flies.

The roar of the docks surged through dull and confused, a medley of clanking hatch-covers, complaining tackle, deep-throated protests of donkey-engines, outlandish commands from stevedores, and the yelps of high-strung little tugs bossing the lighters.

Vanderzee pottered at his books behind the bar, smoking a china pipe. His watchful eye was on his Chinese boy polishing the brasswork of the taps. The last of the noon idlers had gone, and the door leading to the Mole was shut against the hot breeze lifting from the sun's glare on the river.

Then a beam of light whipped across the floor with a shuffle of feet on the stone steps outside. Captain Dinshaw tottered in, gasping for breath and shaking with excitement.

"Van!" he cried, weakly, making for the bar. "I'm rich!"

The black man grunted, and put his pipe in his mouth, staring past Dinshaw at the door as if he expected to see a pursuing party burst in and attack the old man, who seemed spent from running.

"Who's der drouble?" he growled. "For v'y you roon?"

"I've hauled the wind!" cried Dinshaw, dropping his parcel on the bar, and throwing up his hands in a gesture of wild delight.

"My luck's turned! I'm a rich man, I tell ye!"

"Vell," remarked Vanderzee with stolid calm. "If you puy a monkey in some oder blaces, don'd pring him here to me. You vant me droubles to haff der bolice mit, hey? A few trinks you get, der sun your het in, und—dronk der Cuartel in und my license I loose maype."

"I'll make ye rich!" persisted Dinshaw, in his high-pitched, quivering voice, and giving no heed to the admonitions of the black man and not in the least disconcerted by the lack of welcome. "I'm goin' to my island!"

"Der more kvicker, der more petter," said Vanderzee, and humped his shoulders up with a convulsive shrug. "Maype you prink it back und anchor it off der lighthouse, hey?"

"Jarrow'll take me in the Nuestra," continued Dinshaw, now as if talking to himself. "I'll be rich and have good soup for supper. I've got the tide this time, an' no mistake. It's turned for me, as I allus said it would, and Jarrow'll head out for my island. I tell ye, man, it's all settled. Have ye seen Jarrow?"

"Charrow petter nod see