“‘It is too much,’ said I, ‘especially as we did not liberate the other prisoners.’
“‘It was the price agreed,’ he said, ‘but if you say so I will take off ten per cent. for cash.’
“‘Even then it is too much. There were the jewels which you gave to Trocas——’
“Rosenthal chuckled. ‘They were imitations,’ said he. ‘I got them in New York. Those I left with little Jacob were also imitations. I knew my little brother’s weaknesses,’ he added, and the tears gushed out of his eyes.”
TWO SAVAGES
“WE must really turn over a new leaf, Doctor,” said my shipmate, Dr. Leyden, the collector of natural rarities. “Our tales have been growing more and more gruesome each night, until mere murder has quite lost its pungency! To-night I will tell you a different sort of story—a love story, from the view-point of the primitive; a funny story as well—although it would be hard to say whether the humor belong to the Stone Age or some age still to come.
“I was telling you last night about the expedition into Borneo for the heads; this was immediately after. When we reached the sea I was in a very bad way—running a steady, low fever, with diurnal rises, when I would become quite delirious, and the region about my spleen was so tender that it pained me to breathe. My companion and his charge departed immediately by a vessel which was sailing for Sarawak, but I waited for a few days and then sailed by a schooner for Sulu, as this was a shorter voyage, and I wanted medical attendance as soon as I could get it.
“This was before your war, Doctor, when nine out of ten Americans would have told you that if Sulu was not in South Africa it must be somewhere in the West Indies. You know Jolo, the pretty little toy city, with its mediæval walls, where the sleepy Spanish sentries drowsed on the ramparts and gaped down into the immured market-place, ogling the pretty Mestiza girls, when they should have been keeping watch to see that none of the Moro gentry went jementado and proceeded to reduce the Christian census. It is the freshest place in the archipelago and the coolest, although so near the equator, for the trades sweep right across the little island and blow the most of the time.