s a curious yellowish brown and his eyes were very black; he rather
looked like a Spanish Creole than an Englishman. He had nothing of his
brother's quiet manner. Although he was getting old, he walked with a
jaunty step; he had a humorous twinkle, and his laugh was careless. In
fact, he had an exotic, romantic look that harmonized with Kit's notions
of the pirates who once haunted the Gulf of Mexico. When Kit afterwards
learned why Adam's friends called him the "buccaneer," he saw that his
first impression was not extravagant.

Now he remembered that when they sat behind the imitation Moorish arches
on the hotel veranda Adam studied him and laughed.

"You're certainly Peter's son," he remarked. "I can imagine I'd just left
him at the end of the Ashness lonning thirty years since. Except that
he's got older, I reckon he hasn't changed, and for that matter, Peter
was never young. Well, you are surely like him, but if you stop in this
country we'll put a move on you."

"If I'm like my father, I am satisfied," Kit rejoined.

Adam's black eyes twinkled. "Now I see a difference; there's red blood in
you. But don't take me wrong. Peter's a white man, straight as a
plumb-line, one of the best; he's a year the younger of us, but when the
old man died he brought me up. There are two kinds of Askews and I belong
to the other lot. I don't know why they called you after roystering Kit."

It was obvious that Adam knew the family history, for Christopher Askew
was a turbulent Jacobite who lost the most part of his estate when he
joined Prince Charlie's starving Highlanders in the rearguard fight at
Clifton Moor. Afterwards the sober quietness at Ashness had now and then
been disturbed by an Askew who inherited the first Kit's reckless
temperament.

Three years had gone since Kit met Adam, and he had learned much. To
begin with, Adam sent him to an American business school, and made him
study Castilian and French. Then he sent him to Mexico and countries
farther south, where he studied human nature of strangely varied kinds.
He met and traded with men of many colors: French and Spanish Creoles,
negroes, Indians, and half-breeds with some of the blood of all. He knew
the American gulf ports and their cosmopolitan hotels and gambling
saloons, but Adam noted with half-amused approval that while he was not
at all a prig he developed Peter's character and not Kit the Jacobite's.
Now they were going south across the Caribbean on a busi