with an elbow on the bar, careless
and confident under the skeptical eyes of the white-jacketed barman.

"I reckon Tom Mowbray knows when he's safe," he said. "Why, if he was
to do any o' them things to me I'd get him if I had to dig for him.
Yes, sir!"

From thence the course of events ran as anyone familiar with the
Barbary Coast might have prophesied. They returned to the
boarding-house for supper and joined their fellows at the long table
in the back room, and were waited on by Tom Mowbray's "runners."
Mowbray himself, with his scared, lean wife and his wife's crippled
brother, had a table apart from the men; as he ate he entertained
himself by baiting the unhappy cripple, till the broken man stammered
tearfully across the table at him, shaking and grimacing in a nervous
frenzy, which Tom Mowbray always found comical. The woman between
them sat with her eyes downcast and her face bitter and still; they
made a picture of domesticity at which the sailors stared in a
fascination of perplexity, while the hard-faced "runners" in their
shirt-sleeves carried the plates to and from the kitchen, and the
ritual of the evening meal proceeded to its finish.

If there was in Goodwin a quality more salient than his youthful
force and his trust in his own capacity, it was the manner he had of
seeing absorbedly the men and things that presented themselves to his
eyes, so that even in dull and trivial matters he gathered strong
impressions and vivid memories. The three people at the little table
made a group from which, while he ate, he could not withdraw his
eyes. The suffering passivity of the woman, the sly, sinister humor
in Tom Mowbray's heavy, grey face, the livid and impotent hate that
frothed in the crippled man, and his strange jerky gestures, the
atmosphere of nightmare cruelty and suffering that enveloped them
like a miasma these bit themselves into his imagination and left it
sore. He saw and tasted nothing of what he ate and drank; he was lost
in watching the three at the other table; the man who refilled his
cup with coffee winked across his head to one of the others as though
in mirth at his abstraction.

In the ordinary way he would have gone for a walk up-town with his
friend after supper; but he was not in a mood for company that
evening and found himself sleepy besides. He went upstairs to the
bedroom he shared with two other men to get some tobacco he had
there, and discovered in himself so strong an inclin