But if Sevier were an adventurer he was certainly the smoothest specimen of the fraternity that Elliott had yet encountered. And why should such a man be going to India, surely a most unpromising field for the industrious chevalier. As if in answer to the mental inquiry, Sevier announced that he was going to obtain material for a series of magazine articles upon the East, as well as for a number of newspaper letters which he proposed to “syndicate” to half a dozen dailies as special correspondence.
“And I’ll have to spend the next six months mixing up with this sort of fellows,” he lamented, waving his hand toward a group of Anglo-Indians with seasoned complexions who were deep in “bridge” at a neighbouring table. “I’m too American, or too Southern, or something, to know how to get on with those chaps. I reckon it’s the fault of my education. I can’t drink their drinks, and I never learned to play whist right, and I’ve told them my best stories, and they took about as well as the Declaration of Independence. I expect I’ll be right glad when I get back where I can see a game of baseball and play poker. Do you play poker at all?”
“Not on shipboard. I find it’s liable to make me seasick,” replied Elliott, a trifle grimly.
The last apparently careless question had, he thought, given him the clue to the secret of his companion’s presence on board, though professional gamblers seldom operate upon the Eastern steamship lines.
“I’ll give you a bit of advice, too,” he added. “Don’t start any little game on board, unless it’s a very little one, indeed. These boats aren’t as sporty as the Atlantic liners.”
Sevier stared a moment, and then burst out laughing.
“Oh, I’m no card crook,” he said, without showing any offence. “I didn’t want to skin you. I’m the worst poker player you ever saw, but I felt somehow like opening jackpots. I’ll play penny-ante with you all the evenin’, and donate the proceeds to a Seaman’s Home, if you like.”
Elliott declined this invitation to charity, but he sat chatting for a long time with the young Alabaman. His suspicions were by no means lulled, but, after all, as he reflected, he would be neither Sevier’s victim nor his confederate, and, though he did not know it, he was acquiring something of the adventurer’s lax notions of morality.
But it was pleasant to talk again on American matters, and to hear the familiar Southern opinions, couched in the familiar Southern drawl. It would, besides, have been difficult to find anywhere a more pleasant fellow traveller than Sevier. He possessed a fund of reminiscence and anecdote of an experience that seemed, in spite of his youth, to have been almost universal, and of a world in which he appeared to have played many parts. Newspaper work was his latest part, and he spoke little of it. Indeed, he was anything but autobiographical, and his tales were almost wholly of the adventures of other men, whose irregularities he viewed with the purely objective and unmoral interest of the man of the world who is at once a cynic and an optimist. Above all, he seemed to have an eye for opportunities of easy money which was more like a down-easter than a man from the Gulf Coast, though he confessed frankly that he was just then in hard luck.
“I’ve made fortunes,” he said. “If I had half the money that I’ve blown in like a fool, I wouldn’t be a penny-a-liner now.”