ore the
war certain matters took me to South Africa. One evening, in the
smoking-room of the Grand Hotel at Capetown, a queer-looking man asked
if my name was Bellamy, and, when I told him it was, inquired if Limping
Dick was my brother."

"Limping Dick?" exclaimed Amaryllis.

"Yes," said Sir Randal. "That was the first time I ever heard the name
he is known by from Soeul to Zanzibar, from Alaska to Honolulu."

"Why do they call him that?" asked the girl.

The man smiled. "Because he has a limp," he said. "But how he came by it
is more than I can tell you. I told the fellow that I had indeed a young
brother Richard, and that my young brother Richard certainly had a limp.
We were saved the trouble of further description by the interruption of
a high-pitched voice:

"'Not a shade shy of six foot tall; shoulders like Georgees Carpenteer's
when he's pleased with life in the movies; hair black as a Crow Injun's;
eyes blue as a hummin' bird's weskit; and a grip--wa-al, he don't wear
no velvet gloves: Limpin' Dick Bellamy!'

"'That's him,' said the queer man. I agreed that the portrait was
unmistakable, and asked if either of them could tell me where he was
now, as I hadn't seen him for a long time. So the queer man told me that
two years before Dick, who was then overseer of a large rubber
plantation north of Banjermassin in Borneo, had given him a job. He
added, however, that my brother had left Borneo some six months later.
The American had first met him four years before in Bombay, and they had
joined forces in a pearl-fishing expedition which took them somewhere in
the Persian Gulf--the Bahr-el--Bahr-el-Benat Islands, I think; they had
separated four months later and had not met again for more than three
years, when the American had run across him as part owner of a cattle
ranch in Southern Paraguay."

Amaryllis was interested in spite of herself; but her father had heard
these things before, and was thinking of others.

"Jack-of-all-trades," he said, turning towards the house.

"And master of most," called Bellamy after him.

"What a good brother you are!" said Amaryllis softly.

"He's all the family I've got, Amaryllis," he said. "Besides, I'm almost
old enough to be his father, and I often feel as if I were."

"From what you've told me, he must be thirty at least," objected the
girl, "and I'm sure you're not fifty."

"Over," said Bellamy.

"You don't look it," she answered.

"Thank you."

"What for