"Zis," he said, "zis is mos' natural. Only it iss no good for 'istory. You will never write z' natural 'istory of your great discovery, my friend, because it is too dam natural for anybody to believe."
And he said true, and that's why I'm telling you the story free gratis as Andrew Harben told it to me, which you may write yourself if you got the nerve. Andrew Harben he'll tell you the same if you find him hammering rust by the Cape Town breakwater. He's all right now, but for a long time after they took him away from Borneo he was just a little peculiar one way. It wasn't bugs nor snakes nor natives nor any such vermin that excited him, though you might think so. No, he was cured of all that. But whenever he chanced to see a lamp anywhere that was carelessly tended, spattering or smoking and the flame burning low and foul, then Andrew Harben would begin to carry on.
"Ya—ya!" he would yell, meaning why the devil don't you trim your wicks?
Which, when you think of it, was no more than natural, as the skipper said.
DOUBLOON GOLD
I remembered the big chap with the China-blue eyes and the great mop of tangled fair hair. I had seen him one night, a month or so before, at Monte Carlo, where he wound up a run against the red by snapping the sovereigns off his cuff links. And here, in the Casino Pavao, at Funchal, I remarked him in almost the identical gesture. He fumbled through all his pockets before he found and tossed out upon the board a goldpiece, broad and ruddy as his own openair face. Now, as then, I saw him summon his last reserve for a final plunge. The coin fell on manque, and there he let it lie.
We were in charge of a highly superior banker at that table—a model banker, a window model of a banker, with spade-cut beard, jet brows, waxen face, and perfectly faultless armor of full dress. Throughout the evening he had been spinning the wheel and shooting the little marble along its saucer rim with the detached regularity of an automaton. But when this strange token dropped shimmering beside him he stood like one transfixed, then bent over to stare, and presently passed a signal to the fat croupier across from him. And both of them stared at the thing, which shone like a full moon on the smooth green pool of the table.
I was not so sure of the rest. But it seemed to me that a sudden flame lighted their professionally indifferent eyes, that the spark of some swift excitement leaped between them. I say I could not be sure, because I was tiptoe with eagerness myself.
Nobody else was paying any noticeable attention to the big gambler or to his fortunes. A silent crowd jostled stiffly about the board, three deep, unmindful of the heat, the puddled air, the aching blue-white lights—a cosmopolitan crowd, such as one finds in the season at a minor crossroads like Madeira, where types are varied, if not extreme.