scene. He stood head and shoulders over those around him in a line of applicants at a booking desk toward the rear. There was an air of detachment about him. Apparently he was untouched of the spirit of mystic restlessness and excitement which pervaded the place—that resistless, undeniable spirit which takes hold of even the most unimaginative and lackadaisical in railway depots or wherever else men in numbers set out upon journeys. There was no gleam of the homeward-bounder in his eye—that gleam which is more like the light of love than anything else; there was no expectancy; no sign of eagerness.

At a first glance this man's face seemed no more than a mask. At a second one realized that the features were those of one who must have won unto the priceless possession of self-control. The nose was large and yet as sensitively formed as the freshly shaven lips and chin. The ears were perfectly lobed—the ears of a thoroughbred. The jaw was that of the natural fighter, not heavy and jowly, but cut in a sharp, straight line from the hinge to the point. Tiny wrinkles in the outer corners of the eyelids, which come from facing long distances on sea or land, kept forming and reforming as his gray eyes wandered idly over the heads of the crowd. It is thus that the tribes of the earth's big spaces are marked.

Several times he pushed his small gray felt hat back from his brow and then as absently pulled it down again. When he did this one saw the seam of a jagged scar, still pink from recent healing, which traversed the left temple and disappeared in the dark-brown hair over the ear. Although the forelock and the temples were quite gray, he was not more than thirty-five years old.

His blue serge suit fitted well and the trimness of his setting-up—his whole hearing, in fact—spoke of one of military training. Perhaps it was this suggestion of the soldier that made the Sikhs turn and look back at him as they passed out on The Bund. Yet it was not as a soldier that the port of Yokohama knew him, but by the name of Whitridge and as the captain of the sorriest-looking piece of sea grist that had ever made Tokyo Bay. A brute of a Chinese tramp she was, and men who knew deep waters were still marveling how he had brought her through the vitals of a typhoon—the worst in their memory—which had swept the coast in a fury of destruction.

Chinese tramps and those who go in them are of little moment, but on the morning two months before that the port had awakened to find in its fairway a salt-crusted thing called the Kau Lung, minus funnels and masts and suggesting only vaguely a steamship, it knew that 

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