g down the hall to the
ballroom, bearing a nondescript figure on their shoulders. "Here he
comes--the boys are bringing him in here! Oh!" he cried, turning to
the musicians, "can't you play something?--any-thing! Hit it up for all
you're worth! Ridgeway--Nat, look here! Ross was Yale, y' know--Yale
'95; ain't we enough Yale men here to give him the yell?"

Out of all time and tune, but with a vigor that made up for both, the
musicians banged into a patriotic air. Jerry, standing on a chair that
itself was standing on the platform, led half a dozen frantic men in the
long thunder of the "Brek-kek-kek-kek, co-ex, co-ex."

Around the edges of the hall excited girls, and chaperons themselves no
less agitated, were standing up on chairs and benches, splitting their
gloves and breaking their fans in their enthusiasm; while every male
dancer on the floor--ensigns in their gold-faced uniforms and "rovers"
in starched and immaculate shirt-bosoms--cheered and cheered and
struggled with one another to shake hands with a man whom two of their
number old Yale grads, with memories of athletic triumphs yet in their
minds--carried into that ball-room, borne high upon their shoulders.

And the hero of the occasion, the centre of all this enthusiasm--thus
carried as if in triumph into this assembly in evening dress, in white
tulle and whiter kid, odorous of delicate sachets and scarce-perceptible
perfumes--was a figure unhandsome and unkempt beyond description. His
hair was long, and hanging over his eyes. A thick, uncared-for beard
concealed the mouth and chin. He was dressed in a Chinaman's blouse and
jeans--the latter thrust into slashed and tattered boots. The tan and
weatherbeatings of nearly half a year of the tropics were spread over
his face; a partly healed scar disfigured one temple and cheek-bone;
the hands, to the very finger-nails, were gray with grime; the jeans and
blouse and boots were fouled with grease, with oil, with pitch, and all
manner of the dirt of an uncared-for ship. And as the dancers of the
cotillon pressed about, and a hundred kid-gloved hands stretched toward
his own palms, there fell from Wilbur's belt upon the waxed floor of the
ballroom the knife he had so grimly used in the fight upon the beach,
the ugly stains still blackening on the haft.

There was no more cotillon that night. They put him down at last; and
in half a dozen sentences Wilbur told them of how he had been
shanghaied--told them of Magda