usually arrived in a visibly taut-nerved condition at an entirely
irregular and undependable hour. An attack of malignant malaria,
contracted on a prolonged 'gator hunt in the Glades, coupled with the
equally malignant orders of his physician, alone accounted for his
presence there at that unheard of o'clock.

There were purplish semi-circles still painfully too vivid beneath
his eyes; his pallor was still tinged with an ivory-like shade of
yellow. And he fidgeted constantly in the face of Hogarty's happy
deliberation, stretching his heliotrope silk-clad arms and tapping
flat, heel-less rubber-soled shoes on the floor beneath the table in
a fashion that would have irritated any but the blandly unconscious
man across the table from him to a state of violence.

Ogden's quite perfectly lined features were smooth with the smoothness
of twenty years or so. His lack of stability and poise belonged also
to that age and to a physique that managed to tilt the scale beam at
one hundred and eighteen--that is, unless he had been forgetting
rather more rashly than usual that liquids were less sustaining than
solids, when one hundred and ten was about the figure.

He was playing poorly that morning--playing inattentively--with his
eyes always waiting for the hands to indicate that hour which was most
likely to herald the arrival of the advance guard of the crowd of
regulars. Hogarty himself, after a time, began to feel, vaguely, his
uneasiness and lack of application to the matter in hand, and made
evident his irritation by even longer pauses before each play. He
liked a semblance of opposition at least, and he lifted his head,
scowling a little at Ogden's last, most flagrant blunder, to find that
his antagonist had moved without so much as looking at the piece he
had slipped into position.

The boy wasn't looking at the table at all. He sat twisted about in
his chair, staring wide-eyed at the figure that had pushed open the
street door and was now surveying the whole room with an astonishingly
calm attention to detail. Ogden was staring, oblivious to everything
else, and with real cause, for the figure that had hesitated on the
threshold was like no other that had ever drifted into Hogarty's place
before. His shoulders seemed fairly to fill the door-frame, for all
that bigger men than he was had stood on that same spot and gone
unnoticed because of size alone. And his waist appeared almost
slender, and his hips very flat, merel