ransacking. [Pg 7] [Pg 7] Utterly cut off from the world as he had been, the names which mean so much in Society in London, Paris, Vienna, and even in New York, had been lost to him. The faces of the great men of those great cities were to him as a closed book. The faces of their womenkind were as dreams which he had long since forgotten. But there was a dream in the kit-bag. Even Westerham's roystering had not been ill-spent. His knowledge of the world, which, after all, means a certain cognisance of the evil that men do, had taught him that Captain Melun was not a man to perpetrate a common theft. Long years spent in a land peopled practically by Ishmaelites had taught him deep distrust of the stranger—particularly distrust of the stranger who would be friendly. So, many hours had not passed on board the Gigantic before the shrewd inquiries that followed on his suspicions had laid bare before him, as far as could be unfolded, the history of Captain Melun. The captain, it seemed, moved in the best society in London and New York; none the less, he was not liked. There was no actual charge against him, but there appeared to have been bound up in his career in America a number of unpleasant episodes. The record of the episodes was vague, but that suspicion of them was justified lay in the fact that whereas Captain Melun had landed in the States poor he was leaving them enriched. And to lend colour to this justification was the captain's exceedingly unfortunate reputation as a card-player. Now Westerham, if truth must be told, loved[Pg 8] play, and high play. In the old days he had not cared for what stakes he played against men so long as they were honest men; but now he resented as an insult to his good sense the suggestion that he should play, despite the resources at his command, for high stakes against a man who, by some subtle means, seldom, if ever, lost. [Pg 8] It was with these things in his mind—a mind active and of great intelligence, a mind moreover sharpened by adversity—that he looked stonily at Captain Melun. It had almost become second nature for Westerham to draw a gun upon a man whom he had caught apparently intent on theft. Swiftly, however, it came to him that a man in Melun's position was not likely to be engaged
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