The entries were badly blurred, but he could trace himself down through Port Said, Colombo, Singapore—his recollections here were limited to a woman's face in a balcony and the cloying aroma of anisette. He remembered a stop at Sydney, where he made the remarkable discovery that the Circular Quay was completely circular and could be circumnavigated in a night. After that he had a sketchy impression of the Shanghai race meeting and a mad sort of trip in a private yacht full of Australian sheep-something—kings, perhaps; tremendous fellows, anyway, of amazing capacity. And then Manila, of course, the place where he hired an ocean-going tug to urge a broken date on the coy ingénue of a traveling Spanish opera company. And then Macao, where he found and lost her again, as coy as ever, together with his wallet. And after that the hectic session when he and a Norwegian schooner captain hit the bank at fan-tan and swore eternal friendship amid the champagne baskets on the schooner's decks under a complicated moon. It was this same captain who had landed him finally—the baskets having been emptied—at the point of a boot on the strand where now he sat. So much was still quite clear and recent, within range of days.
Always through the maze of these memoirs ran one consistent and tragic motive—a dwindling letter of credit, the fag end of his considerable patrimony. It had expired painlessly at last, the night before if he could trust his head, for there had been a noble wake. He recalled the inscrutable face of the tall white man behind the bar who had cashed it for him after a rate of exchange of his own grim devising. And he recalled, too, a waif bit of their conversation as he signed the ultimate coupon.
"You can date it Fufuti," suggested Bendemeer, and spelled the name for him.
"And where—where the devil is Fufuti?" he asked.
"Three thousand miles from the next pub," said Bendemeer, with excessively dry significance.
The phrase came back to him now....
"In that case," decided Junius Peabody, aloud, "—in that case there's no use trying to borrow car fare, and it's too far to walk. I'm stuck."
Some one sniffed beside him, and he turned to stare into a face that might have been a distortion of his own yellow, haggard image.
"Hello," he said—and then, by natural sequence: "say, you don't happen to have a flask anywhere handy about you—what?"
His neighbor scowled aggrievedly.