iller, he would somehow twist the spill and nip
under the ends with flying fingers. Curious fingers he had--long and
black and muscular--sinister talons that yet were nimble enough to trick
the eye. It was amazing to watch him. As if a fiend from the pit had
been trained to do featherstitch!

* * * * *

Tunstal watched for a time and drank for a time and chuckled like a
parrot over sugar. The adventure suited him; it developed well. There
was promise in it of something different, something quite local and
tropic indeed.

A smooth exhilaration began to crawl through his veins, a heightened
sense of power and perception. He found a special charm in each detail
about him, each to be separately savored. The sunlight, he noted, was
singularly rich and fluid. The yellow lights in his glass seemed to wink
with recondite confidences. A tender spray of vanna showered its tribute
of orange stars upon him; some glorious rose-pink rhododendrons drooped
seductively toward his shoulder. He reached to reap them, and at that
moment--the leaves parted and he saw the girl....

If the event had only transpired a trifle later, as the bard so nearly
says, it would never have transpired at all. Two glasses more of the
golden arrack, one glass even, and the subsequent proceedings could
hardly have interested Mr. Tunstal or anybody else, except possibly
Nivin--Nivin, who had laid his innocent plot to that end. So narrow is
the margin of trouble! He should have blinked at the lovely vision and
slept peacefully safeguarded beside the square-faced bottle until
carried thence aboard the steamer and gone on to tell another
globe-trotting yarn. But he was just a snifter short on that potent and
undisciplined drink. And here was the girl.... "By jing!" breathed Mr.
Tunstal.

Truly by any standard East or West, she was very fair. Of her face he
marked only the oval, the delicate bisque-tinted skin that shames mere
white, and the straight brows, not too broad for a tight-drawn casque of
hair. A striped sarong clipped her waist below the jutting front of her
little green jacket, and he saw the soft swell at her throat and the
fine, free swing of lines as she leaned forward, startled,
downward-looking. An alluring and timely apparition!

Tunstal thought so--to call it thinking. "You pippin," he remarked as he
pulled himself to his feet by the table. He fumbled at his helmet with
some confused notion of beginning gall