d, and how he, Captain
Jack, continued the management of the restaurant pending a settlement
of the proprietor's affairs and an appearance of heirs; how in the
confusion and excitement of the boom no settlement was ever made; and
how, no heirs appearing, he assumed charge of the establishment
himself, paying bills, making contracts, and signing notes, until he
came to consider the business and all its enormous profits as his own;
and how at last, when the restaurant was burned, he found himself some
forty thousand dollars "ahead of the game."

Then he told them of the strange club of the place, called "The
Exiles," made up chiefly of "younger sons" of English and
British-Canadian families, every member possessed of a "past" more or
less disreputable; men who had left their country for their country's
good, and for their family's peace of mind--adventurers, wanderers,
soldiers of fortune, gentlemen-vagabonds, men of hyphenated names and
even noble birth, whose appellations were avowedly aliases. He told
them of his meeting with Billy Isham, one of the club's directors, and
of the happy-go-lucky, reckless, unpractical character of the man; of
their acquaintance, intimacy, and subsequent partnership; of how the
filibustering project was started with Captain Jack's forty thousand,
and the never-to-be-forgotten interview in San Francisco with Senora
Estrada, the agent of the insurgents; of the incident of her
calling-card--how she tore it in two and gave one-half to Isham; of
their outfitting, and the broken sextant that was to cause their
ultimate discomfiture and disaster, and of the voyage to the rendezvous
on a Panama liner.

"Strike me!" continued Captain Jack, "you should have seen Billy Isham
on that Panama dough-dish; a passenger ship she was, and Billy was the
life of her from stem to stern-post. There was a church pulpit aboard
that they were taking down to Mazatlan for some chapel or other, and
this here pulpit was lashed on deck aft. Well, Billy had been most
kinds of a fool in his life, and among others a play-actor; called
himself Gaston Maundeville, and was clean daft on his knowledge of
Shakespeare and his own power of interpretin' the hidden meanin' of the
lines. I ain't never going to forgit the day he gave us Portia's
speech. We were just under the tropic, and the day was a scorcher.
There was mostly men folk aboard, and we lay around the deck in our
pajamas, while Billy--Gaston Maundeville, dressed