ngular gallery, he could
look down on the "well" of the fan-tan lay out below.

He made his way to a seat at the rail, took out a cigar, lighted it,
and let his veiled gaze wander about the place, point by point, until
he had inspected and weighed and appraised every man in the building.
He continued to smoke, listlessly, like a sightseer with time on his
hands and in no mood for movement. The brim of his black boulder
shadowed his eyes. His thumbs rested carelessly in the arm-holes of
his waistcoat. He lounged back torpidly, listening to the drone and
clatter of voices below, lazily inspecting each newcomer, pretending to
drop off into a doze of ennui. But all the while he was most acutely
awake.

For somewhere in that gathering, he knew, there was a messenger
awaiting him. Whether he was English or Portuguese, white or yellow,
Blake could not say. But from some one there some word or signal was
to come.

He peered down at the few white men in the pit below. He watched the
man at the head of the carved blackwood table, beside his heap of brass
"cash," watched him again and again as he took up his handful of coins,
covered them with a brass hat while the betting began, removed the hat,
and seemed to be dividing the pile, with the wand in his hand, into
fours. The last number of the last four, apparently, was the object of
the wagers.

Blake could not understand the game. It puzzled him, just as the
yellow men so stoically playing it puzzled him, just as the entire
country puzzled him. Yet, obtuse as he was, he felt the gulf of
centuries that divided the two races. These yellow men about him
seemed as far away from his humanity, as detached from his manner of
life and thought, as were the animals he sometimes stared at through
the bars of the Bronx Zoo cages.

A white man would have to be pretty far gone, Blake decided, to fall
into their ways, to be satisfied with the life of those yellow men. He
would have to be a terrible failure, or he would have to be hounded by
a terrible fear, to live out his life so far away from his own kind.
And he felt now that Binhart could never do it, that a life sentence
there would be worse than a life sentence to "stir." So he took
another cigar, lighted it, and sat back watching the faces about him.

For no apparent reason, and at no decipherable sign, one of the yellow
faces across the smoke-filled room detached itself from its fellows.
This face showed no curiosit