“May I ask for your explanation or your excuse?”
“You can call it an explanation or an excuse, whichever you like,” Hamel replied steadily, “but the fact is that this little building, which some one else seems to have appropriated, is mine. If I had not been a good-natured person, I should be engaged, at the present moment, in turning out its furniture on to the beach.”
“What is your name?” Mr. Fentolin asked suddenly.
“My name is Hamel—Richard Hamel.”
For several moments there was silence. Mr. Fentolin was still leaning forward in his strange little vehicle. The colour seemed to have left even his lips. The hard glitter in his eyes had given place to an expression almost like fear. He looked at Richard Hamel as though he were some strange sea-monster come up from underneath the sands.
“Richard Hamel,” he repeated. “Do you mean that you are the son of Hamel, the R.A., who used to be in these parts so often? He was my brother’s friend.”
“I am his son.”
“But his son was killed in the San Francisco earthquake. I saw his name in all the lists. It was copied into the local papers here.”
Hamel knocked the ashes from his pipe.
“I take a lot of killing,” he observed. “I was in that earthquake, right enough, and in the hospital afterwards, but it was a man named Hamel of Philadelphia who died.”