operly, win or lose. I've
tried them both ways, too. Hang them for a beggarly, bloodless lot of
animated cucumbers!"

"And if anything out of the way was to happen, they would be just
as cool in locking you and your gentleman up," Schomberg snarled
unpleasantly.

"Indeed!" said Ricardo slowly, taking Schomberg's measure with his eyes.
"And what about you?"

"You talk mighty big," burst out the hotel-keeper. "You talk of ranging
all over the world, and doing great things, and taking fortune by the
scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this miserable business!"

"It isn't much of a lay--that's a fact," admitted Ricardo unexpectedly.

Schomberg was red in the face with audacity.

"I call it paltry," he spluttered.

"That's how it looks. Can't call it anything else." Ricardo seemed to
be in an accommodating mood. "I should be ashamed of it myself, only you
see the governor is subject to fits--"

"Fits!" Schomberg cried out, but in a low tone. "You don't say so!" He
exulted inwardly, as if this disclosure had in some way diminished the
difficulty of the situation. "Fits! That's a serious thing, isn't it?
You ought to take him to the civil hospital--a lovely place."

Ricardo nodded slightly, with a faint grin.

"Serious enough. Regular fits of laziness, I call them. Now and then
he lays down on me like this, and there's no moving him. If you think I
like it, you're a long way out. Generally speaking, I can talk him over.
I know how to deal with a gentleman. I am no daily-bread slave. But when
he has said, 'Martin, I am bored,' then look out! There's nothing to do
but to shut up, confound it!"

Schomberg, very much cast down, had listened open-mouthed.

"What's the cause of it?" he asked. "Why is he like this? I don't
understand."

"I think I do," said Ricardo. "A gentleman, you know, is not such a
simple person as you or I; and not so easy to manage, either. If only I
had something to lever him out with!"

"What do you mean, to lever him out with?" muttered Schomberg
hopelessly.

Ricardo was impatient with this denseness.

"Don't you understand English? Look here! I couldn't make this
billiard table move an inch if I talked to it from now till the end of
days--could I? Well, the governor is like that, too, when the fits are
on him. He's bored. Nothing's worthwhile, nothing's good enough, that's
mere sense. But if I saw a capstan bar lying about here, I would soon
manage to shift that billiard table of