away.

The only allusion Bell ever made to his remoter past was drawn from him a few days later, when—he was watching me paint again—I chanced to mention that I had spent a fortnight in the Philippines on my way south from Saigon to Australia. Glancing up at the sound of his sharp intake of breath, I saw his jaw set over the questions that leapt to the tip of his tongue, to relax gradually as a faraway look came into his wide-set grey eyes and a wistful smile of reminiscence parted his lips.

"Did you heah the band play on the Luneta in the evenin'?" he asked eagerly, "while the spiggoties in their calesas wuh racin' round the circle, an' the kiddies an' theyah nusses wuh rompin' on the grass, an' the big red sun was goin' down behind Mariveles beyond the bay? An' did you know the Ahmy an' Navy Club—not the new one ... the ol' one ovah cross the moat inside the wall?"

"Put up there all my time in Manila," I replied. "A very comfy old hangout, especially considering what the hotels were."

"An'—did you—" (he gulped once or twice as though the question came hard) "did you evah heah them speak at the Club of a chap called Blake ... Lootenant-Commandah Blake? He was a son of Captain Blake, who helped Sampson polish off Cervera, an' a gran'son of Adm'al Blake. Ol' naval fam'ly."

"You mean the man who pulled off that coup when Wood was cleaning up the crater of Bud Dajo? Some kind of a bluff on his own with one of the little old gunboats Dewey captured after the Battle of Manila Bay, wasn't it? Scared some Jolo Dato into giving up a bunch of our men he already had lined up against a wall to bolo, didn't he? Of course, I remember perfectly now. General X——" (mentioning the Military Governor of Mindanao by name) "told me the yarn himself the night I dined with him in Zamboanga. He said no one but an old poker shark would ever have thought of the stunt, much less had the nerve to bluff it out. Incidentally he mentioned that the chap was the best poker player in the Navy, as he was also the speediest baseball pitcher ever graduated from Annapolis; that he had been missed almost as much for the one as the other since he dropped out of sight several years before. Some difficulty about—"

"Tryin' to push Corregidor out of the entrance to Manila Bay with the nose of his gunboat," Bell cut in harshly, the hell in his soul glowing through his eyes as the glare of the coal-bed welters beyond a stoker's lifted furnace flap. That, and a single sob sucked through his contracted throat as the vacuum in his chest called for air, were the only outward signs of the intensest spasm of throttled emotion I ever saw assail a human being. Then the square jaw tightened, the cords of the muscular neck drew taut, and what would have been another body and soul racking sob was noiselessly absorbed in the buffer of a flexed diaphragm. The fires of agony behind the eyes paled and died down like an expiring coal. The corrugations of the brow smoothed out as a smile—half amused, half wistful—relaxed the set lips. The old controlled Bell (I shall continue to call him so) was in the saddle again.

"So they still remembah mah ball-playin'," he drawled musingly, his left hand digits gently massaging the bulbous swelling remaining after some red-hot drive had telescoped the middle finger of his right. "Ye'es, of co'se they'd miss mah wing in the Ahmy-Navy game at Ca'nival time. But mah pokah—we'ell I reckon a few of 'em did find mah pokah hand about as bafflin' as mah baseball ahm. But it was straight deliv'ry, tho'—both of 'em. An' they wouldn't be callin' me a fo'-flushah, etha. No, you didn't heah any of 'em say that, I'm right suah."

A smile more whimsical than bitter twitched his lips twice or thrice in the minute or two he stood alone with his thoughts. "So I've sort o' dropped out o' sight to 'em?" he said finally. "We'ell, I guess that was about the best thing to happen for all consuned. But, just the same, if you evah go back Manila-way I won't be mindin' it if you tell 'em that, tho' the ol' wing's tuhn'd to glass from long lack o' limberin', an' tho' I don't play pokah down heah fo' feah o' bein' knifed fo' mah luck, I'm still hittin' true to fohm in mah own lil' game of alterin' the sea map with the noses of ships. I reckon they'll know the reason why."

There was another interval of silence, but, unlike the other, not charged, electric. Bell's blow-off through the safety-valve of frank speech had taken the peak off the pent-up pressure within, and when he spoke again it was merely to quote what the Governor of North Carolina had said about its having been a long time between drinks. "Great thust aggravateh, the Sou'east Trade." Would I mind—ahem—hiking home with him and lubricating my tonsils with a drop of "J. Walkah"? That was simply his delicate way of pretending to ignore my slavery to absinthe, a habit which not even the most whisky-saturated sot of an Anglo-Saxon can ever quite forgive one of his race for falling a victim to. I wouldn't? "We'ell, hasta manyanah."

With a crunch of coral clinkers under his feet and a stave of "Carry Me Back to Ol' Virginny" on his lips, Bell, disdaining the smooth path by the beach, swung off through the pandanus scrub on what he called a "bee-line for home"! He had a weakness for taking "short-cuts" on land as well as at sea. Never again—not even in the moment of his great decision—did he lift for me or any other man the "furnace flap" of iron reserve that masked the fires of his innermost soul.

Their saving "sense of sport," which was the golden vein in the rough iron of the "beach push" of Kai, made it inevitable that they should have a substantial sense of respect for a man of Bell's stamp, and this might easily have ripened to an active popularity had not the American's quiet but inflexible reserve prevented their knowing him better. They suspected that he was no novice in handling the big Colt's that was flopping on his hip when he landed, they knew that there was a weighty punch behind his long arm, and they were frankly outspoken in their admiration of the manner in which he stowed and carried his booze. But what had impressed them more than anything else was the way in which he had taken the devil out of a vicious imp of a Solomon Island pony on the beach one morning. "Hellish hard-handed," "Slant" Allen had said, as his steel-blue eyes narrowed down to slits in the intensity of his interest and admiration; "but a seat like he was screwed to the brute's backbone. Old cross-country rider—hundred to one on it. Man in a million in a steeplechase on a horse strong enough to carry the weight. Gawd, what a seat!"

All in all, indeed, there was only one thing the "beach" held against Bell, and that was Rona, or rather his possession of her. There was nothing personal in this, of course. They merely regarded the big American in the same light they had always regarded a man with a chest of pearls or anything else of value that their simple, direct natures made them yearn for the possession of. There was this difference, however. Where the "push" of Kai would have combined to a man to get away with a box of pearls or a cargo of shell, the annexing of a woman was essentially a lone-hand game, and—well, Bell was hardly the kind of a "one-man job" any of them cared to tackle. I feel practically certain that, but for the disturbance of the even tenor of Kai's way incident to the Cora Andrews affair, his "rights" in Rona would never have been challenged.