re, many of them, and the chill that struck through him on this
particular morning was worse than any hang-over. It was the soul of
Junius Peabody that felt cold and sick, and when he fumbled through his
pockets--the subtle relation between the pockets and the soul is a point
sadly neglected by our best little psychologists--he uncovered a very
definite reason. His last penny was gone.

Under the shock of conviction Mr. Peabody sought to cast up the mental
log, in the hope of determining where he was and how he came to be
there.

The entries were badly blurred, but he could trace himself down through
Port Said, Colombo, Singapore--his recollections here were limited to a
woman's face in a balcony and the cloying aroma of anisette. He
remembered a stop at Sydney, where he made the remarkable discovery that
the Circular Quay was completely circular and could be circumnavigated
in a night. After that he had a sketchy impression of the Shanghai race
meeting and a mad sort of trip in a private yacht full of Australian
sheep-something--kings, perhaps; tremendous fellows, anyway, of amazing
capacity. And then Manila, of course, the place where he hired an
ocean-going tug to urge a broken date on the coy ingenue of a traveling
Spanish opera company. And then Macao, where he found and lost her
again, as coy as ever, together with his wallet. And after that the
hectic session when he and a Norwegian schooner captain hit the bank at
fan-tan and swore eternal friendship amid the champagne baskets on the
schooner's decks under a complicated moon. It was this same captain who
had landed him finally--the baskets having been emptied--at the point of
a boot on the strand where now he sat. So much was still quite clear and
recent, within range of days.

Always through the maze of these memoirs ran one consistent and tragic
motive--a dwindling letter of credit, the fag end of his considerable
patrimony. It had expired painlessly at last, the night before if he
could trust his head, for there had been a noble wake. He recalled the
inscrutable face of the tall white man behind the bar who had cashed it
for him after a rate of exchange of his own grim devising. And he
recalled, too, a waif bit of their conversation as he signed the
ultimate coupon.

"You can date it Fufuti," suggested Bendemeer, and spelled the name for
him.

"And where--where the devil is Fufuti?" he asked.

"Three thousand miles from the next pub," said Bendemeer, w