“This office was too blooming handy,” he explained, throwing aside his blue pencil to mop his brow. “If the hooligans loafing in the Gardens or on the jetty had an idle hour on their hands, they spent it inventing tales and strolled up here to see how much they could get out of the Society by springing them on me. There was more than one of them, too, that I’d have taken on the staff if he could have dished up as good a yarn every week. But the thing got to be a fad, and, when I found that a couple of fellows that applied to me had their pockets full of dibs at the time, I decided to let the secretary, the Baptist minister, do the distributing. His parsonage is four miles from the harbor, and the man that will walk that far in Ceylon deserves all he can get out of him.”
Far out beyond the leper hospital, where putrescent mortals peered dejectedly through the palings, I came upon the bungalow of the Reverend Peacock, set well back from the red highway in a grove of palms. Several old acquaintances, including Askins, had assembled. One of them stood abjectly, hat in hand, before the judgment-seat at the end of the veranda.
The secretary was a man of pugilistic build, with the voice of a side-show barker. His very roar seemed an assertion that he was an infallible judge of human nature. Yet, strangely enough, he treated most liberally the professional vagrants, and turned away empty-handed those whose stories were told stammeringly for want of practice. Among those who appeared before him that morning, for example, were two grafters, Askins and myself; and an Italian sailor, really deserving of assistance.
The Irishman chose to state his case in the language of university circles.
“Surely,” cried the reverend gentleman, in delight, “this must be the first time a man of your parts has found himself in this predicament?”
“Verily, yes, Reverend Peacock,” quoth the learned son of Erin, with an unrestrainable sigh, “the first indeed. As I can’t count the other times, they don’t count,” he murmured to himself. “It’s the asthma, reverend sir.”
“I shall be glad to make yours a special case,” said the secretary; “Step aside into my study.”
I advanced to tell my tale and received eight tickets, twice the usual number. A moment later the Italian was driven from the parsonage grounds with the nearest approach to an oath that a minister is entitled to include in his vocabulary.
The tickets, worth four cents each, entitled the holder to as many meals of currie and rice, tea, bananas, and cakes in a native shop chosen by the Society; it was the poorest in town. A faulty management was suggested, too, by the fact that the proprietor was easily induced to make good the Society vouchers in a neighboring arrack-shop.
Three day later, as dawn was breaking, I climbed the fence of the “American Park Hotel” and strolled away to the beach for a dip in the surf. Breakfast would have been more to the point, but my last ticket was spent. One by one, “the boys,” little suspecting that this was to prove the red-letter day of that Colombo season, turned back into the squat city; and as the sun mounted higher I retreated to the freight wharves, where the vague promise of a job had been held out to me the day before.