"Unusual?"
"I mean unusual for Europeans. A sailor----"
"Are you a sailor?"
"At your service. What I was going to say was that a sailor comes across strange things sometimes."
"You interest me; tell me something about it. Shooting is a perfect passion with me."
Ottomar had seated himself nearer to Reinhold, and looked at him with his inquiring brown eyes. Those eyes found it easy work to charm an answer out of Reinhold.
So he related his adventures in a buffalo hunt in the Arkansas prairies, and in a tapir hunt in Ceylon, to which Ottomar listened attentively, only now and then correcting some unsportsmanlike expression, or begging for a clearer explanation on some point which either he did not quite understand, or which seemed to be of importance.
"That is capital!" he exclaimed at last. "He must be a good shot that--what's his name?--the Englishman, Mr. Smirkson; and you can't shoot badly either, but then you are a soldier. By the way, do you still not remember where we came across each other? It must have been in Orleans, as, so far as I can remember, that is the only time that my regiment came in contact with yours."
"And it was in Orleans!" cried Reinhold--"of course it was in Orleans, when our two regiments combined to furnish a guard; and a jolly guard it was, too, thanks to your being such good company and having such a cheery temper. How could I have failed to remember it, and even your name, in the last few days? Now it is all coming back to me. Several of your brother officers came in afterwards--a Herr von Walbach."
"Walbach--quite right; he fell afterwards before Paris, poor fellow. I am very intimate with his family. Perhaps he has got the best of it; it is horridly dull work since the campaign was over!"