hat I
want anybody to think I am so long-headed or forehanded a chap as to
spend time only with people who could tell me things! I didn't do any
thinking about it one way or the other. Any man that had time for me, I
had time for him.

I had time for Drislane. He was one of the crew of the _Sirius_, and I
had been seeing quite a little of him while I was in Newport News this
fall on the coal. The _Sirius_ would load, sail, and return; load, sail,
and return; and between trips Drislane and I would have sessions.

I'd seen something of Drislane before this in Boston. His mail used to
come addressed to our Boston office, where everybody knew that twice a
year, toward the end of June and just before Christmas, a check would
come to him from his home in the West. When he came up from the vessel
after a trip and found that home envelope awaiting him, he would step
around to his room, clean up, and in his shore-going suit of clothes
come back, have us cash his check, and then, according to our office
force, it was--Good night! for two weeks.

The check, always the same--for twelve hundred dollars--would have given
him a good two weeks' whirl in highly-rated, expensive places, if he
cared for splurge, but I guess he never was influenced much by
regulation ratings. Any place he liked the looks of would do for
him--and some perhaps that he didn't like the looks of.

It was no use to try to tell the office force that Drislane hadn't a
weak joint somewhere. Man, they _knew_! and holding no berths for the
purely spiritual, with but one suspicious and unexplained action to
work from, would build you up a character of any depth of depravity you
were pleased to have. Three guesses, no more, was all they needed for
Drislane's case. It was rum, or women, or rum _and_ women. If neither,
then there was no hope for him at all--he was insane.

And certainly his judgment in women was something fierce. I'm setting
down now the diction, as well as the judgment, of the office force; this
last judgment being based on the evidence of the two illuminated
occasions when he had come in to cash his check, and each time brought
with him a young woman. Naturally, on his departure, the lads in the
office had a word to say. The only way they could account for his
selections--well, they couldn't account for them. It must be a genius he
had--something was born with him--to pick the homely ones.

There wasn't the least evidence to show that there was a