forty-eight hours he had openly rejoiced with Gates at my
improvement and tried, with the indifferent success of an unbeliever, to
play up at top speed that silly idea of an approaching adventure.

We had strolled aft, and now stopped to watch a tall Jamaica negro--or
so we thought him to be--asking Gates for a place in the crew. His
clothing was too scant to hide the great muscles beneath, and Tommy
touched my arm, saying:

"There's a specimen for you!"

Had he been cast in bronze a critic might have said that the sculptor,
by over-idealizing masculine perfection, had made the waist too small,
the hips too slender, for the powerful chest and shoulders; the wrists
and ankles might have been thought too delicate as terminals for the
massive sinews leading into them. He smiled continually, and spoke in a
soft, almost timid voice.

"I like that big fellow," I said. Perhaps I had been well called a
pantheist, having always extravagantly admired the perfect in form or
face or the wide outdoors.

Feeling my interests he turned from Gates, looking at me with dog-like
pathetic trustfulness. Among the things he told us briefly--for the crew
stood ready to cast off--was that he once followed the sea, but in more
recent years lived by fishing up sponges and at times supplying shark
meat to the poorer quarter of Key West. The carcass of a water fowl tied
to his boat, while he occupied himself with sponges, would sometimes
attract a shark; then he would strip, take a knife in his teeth, and
dive.

I glanced at Gates, but saw no incredulity in his face.

In another hour, at nearly dusk, Key West had grown small and finally
sank below the horizon, leaving only its three skeleton-like towers
standing against the sky--standing erect with all nerves strained,
watch-dogs of the darkening sea; ears cocked, to catch a distressed cry
from some waif out in the mysterious night.

Looking back along our wake I imagined the big black man standing as we
had left him on the dock, gazing after us with patient regret; and I was
glad to have given him the handful of coins at parting, little dreaming
how many times that loaf upon the water would come floating in to me.

Monsieur Dragot revealed himself more and more to our astonished eyes as
we sat that night on deck. He had been a professor in the University of
Bucharest, and hinted at an intimate entente with the reigning house of
Azuria. Besides being versed in many sciences, including m