f! I'm done and double-done.
I been knocked out, with the sun and all.... See here now. Give me the
worth o' that."

"I give you nothing. I don' like your looks. Why, even in my back room,"
puffed Zimballo, "the half-castes and orang sirani, they come here as
_zaintlemen_ only!"

He loomed indignant under the glow of his fine oil lamps, just lighted
against the dusk, in his fine main shed which it was the sentimental
care of his life to run as close as might be on the model of a Levantine
waterside dive.

There is a breed, or a type, whose destiny is to go about the world
purveying garlic, cheap food, infamous wines, and more or less
flea-infested hospitality in all manner of queer corners, by ice-bound
bay or coral strand. So they did in the time of the Ph[oe]nicians, and
so they still do, and that part is right enough. No one could have
found fault with Zimballo's zinc bar, nor his highboy stacked to the
ceiling with multicolored bottles, nor his tattered billiard table, nor
his battered metal furniture. The flaring, red cotton covers, the gilt
mirrors, and the crude prints of obscure royalties; the blue-glass
siphons and the pinky lace curtains: these he had found some heroic
means of transplanting, like the fixtures of a faith.

Meanwhile the East is the East and a good deal of a fixture itself, and
behind his drawn jalousies and his masking vines Zimballo served the
local devil quite successfully.

Not the red and lusty wickedness of other climes, but a languid sort,
thriving in a reek of musk and raw Chinese apple blossom, of stale
cooking and incense and stifled rooms and poisonous sweet champagne, as
dreary as the click of fan-tan cash and the drag of silks and the voices
of a cheeping bird cage that circulated through the secret mazes of the
establishment day and night. An unsmiling devil--in the flesh and on the
spot very well represented you would have said, by one of the billiard
players, a tall, yellow, corpsy individual who had remarked the stir of
Merry's arrival and who now lounged about the table.

"What's the row, Zimballo?" he drawled. "Let's have a share if there's
any fun going. My word--is that a friend of yours?"

"No friend--Cap'n Silva, sir!" protested the hotel keeper, rubbing his
hands in a fluster. It annoyed him vehemently that he had not banished
this disreputable stranger at sight. "Ope to die, sir--I never see 'im
before!"

Other guests had begun to gather at the promise of dive