icroscopes--cigars--wine. He didn't make himself
agreeable here--except to the Arabs. Didn't call at the Residency.
Some of us asked him to dinner one evening, but he pleaded a headache.
We were glad, because afterward we saw him eat at the hotel--has ways
of using his fingers at table, picked up I suppose from the people he
has lived among."

"Are you nearly ready to let us out of here?" asked Monty.

"Your quarantine's up," said the doctor. "I'm only waiting for word
from the office."

We drank three rounds of cocktails with him, after which he grew darkly
friendly and proposed we should all set out together in search of the
hoard.

"I've no money," he assured us. "Nothing but a knowledge of the
natives and a priceless thirst. I'd have to throw up my practise here.
Of course I'd need some sort of guarantee from you chaps."

The proposal falling flat, he gathered the nearly empty bottles into
one place and shouted for his boy to come and carry them away.

"Think it over!" he urged as he got up to leave us. "You might take a
bigger fool than me with you. You'd need a doctor on a trip like that.
I'm an expert on some of these tropical diseases. Think it over!"

"Fred!" said Monty, as soon as the doctor had left the room, "I'm
tempted by this ivory of yours."

But Fred, in the new blue dressing-gown the doctor had brought, was in
another world--a land of trope and key and metaphor. For the last ten
minutes he had kept a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper working, and
now the strident tones of his too long neglected concertina stirred the
heavy air and shocked the birds outside to silence. The instrument was
wheezy, for in addition to the sacrilege the port authorities had done
by way of disinfection, the bellows had been wetted when Fred plunged
from the sinking Bundesrath and swam. But he is not what you could
call particular, as long as a good loud noise comes forth that can be
jerked and broken into anything resembling tune.

"Tempted, are you?" he laughed. He looked like a drunken troubadour en
deshabille, with those up-brushed mustaches and his usually neat brown
beard all spread awry. "Temptation's more fun than plunder!"

Yerkes threw an orange at him, more by way of recognition than
remonstrance. We had not heard Fred sing since he tried to charm
cholera victims in the Bundesrath's fo'castle, and, like the rest of
us, he had his rights. He sang with legs spread wide in front of him,
and