act, a kind of
literary woman. Writes devilish good poetry--only took up the stage
on account of domestic trouble: drunken husband that beat her--regular
affecting story, you know. These sap-headed fools don't, of course,
know THAT. No, sir; she's a remarkable woman! I say, Brimmer, look here!
I"--he hesitated, and then went on more boldly, as if he had formed a
sudden resolution. "What have you got to do to-night?"

Brimmer, who had been lost in abstraction, started slightly, and said,--

"I--oh! I've got an appointment with Keene. You know he's off by the
steamer--day after to-morrow?"

"What! He's not going off on that wild-goose chase, after all? Why, the
man's got Excelsior on the brain!" He stopped as he looked at Brimmer's
cold face, and suddenly colored. "I mean his plan--his idea's all
nonsense--you know that!"

"I certainly don't agree with him," began Brimmer gravely; "but"--

"The idea," interrupted Markham, encouraged by Brimmer's beginning, "of
his knocking around the Gulf of California, and getting up an expedition
to go inland, just because a mail-steamer saw a barque like the
Excelsior off Mazatlan last August. As if the Excelsior wouldn't have
gone into Mazatlan if it had been her! I tell you what it is, Brimmer:
it's mighty rough on you and me, and it ain't the square thing at
all--after all we've done, and the money we've spent, and the nights
we've sat up over the Excelsior--to have this young fellow Keene always
putting up the bluff of his lost sister on us! His lost sister, indeed!
as if WE hadn't any feelings."

The two men looked at each other, and each felt it incumbent to look
down and sigh deeply--not hypocritically, but perfunctorily, as over
a past grief, although anger had been the dominant expression of the
speaker.

"I was about to remark," said Brimmer practically, "that the insurance
on the Excelsior having been paid, her loss is a matter of commercial
record; and that, in a business point of view, this plan of Keene's
ain't worth looking at. As a private matter of our own feelings--purely
domestic--there's no question but that we must sympathize with him,
although he refuses to let us join in the expenses."

"Oh, as to that," said Markham hurriedly, "I told him to draw on me for
a thousand dollars last time I saw him. No, sir; it ain't that. What
gets me is this darned nagging and simpering around, and opening old
sores, and putting on sentimental style, and doing the bereave