It was not so easy to forget Mr. Richard Roe. The memory of him clung to Schrofft even after his work was done in Mindoro, and he had bidden Bagalayag an everlasting farewell. In Manila, Mr. Richard Roe's image dogged his busy footsteps, and when at last he climbed the side of the Rosetta Maru, bound for Hongkong and home, Mr. Roe was at the surface of his thoughts. "Mein Gott!" Schrofft mused, as he leaned on the rail that first night out and saw Bolinao looming faintly in the gulf of blackness, far to leeward, "he saved my life, and now I leave him in the Philippines."
He leaned there, absorbed in a vision of the companionship which could never be, till the last shadow of the islands had faded in the night. Then brusquely, as if he awakened himself, he turned forward to the smoking-room and the nightcap of rum and lime-juice which was his concession to the luxury of rest. "My poor little bum god," he muttered, "if he was here, I'd buy him a drink. He's had too many drinks already, though, poor deffel."
At the door of the smoking-room he stopped abruptly. "Butterflies," he grunted in disgust, and turned aside to a settee which stood near in the shadow, to wait for his drink till they were done. And then, suddenly, he leaned forward and gazed into the brightly lighted room, for a voice there had set all his nerves aquiver. "So?" he muttered incredulously. "Kann nicht sein!"
Inside the room three men were sitting at a little table with a bottle between them, all dressed alike in spotless and unrumpled linen. Their likeness ended with their dress. One was a boy, the down still soft on his chin, but his cheeks were pasty and he had the dead eyes of an evil old man. The second was a flabby man of middle age, whose red face was an expressionless mask, from behind which he looked out watchfully. And the third, brilliant, flashing, shedding a glow of life and strength around him, was Mr. Richard Roe in a new guise.
"How'd you clean up over here this time, Billy?" asked the boy in a dry, professional tone.
"Well enough," Mr. Richard Roe answered. "Went on my uppers once, down in Mindoro."
"I travel on 'em all the time," said the wan youth. "Never saw such luck as I have."
"Get a mascot, Mike," Mr. Richard Roe advised mockingly. "That's what I did. Finest little mannikin of a mascot the Luck Machine ever ground out. Found a little Dutchman down there—down on his luck, sick, almost crying for some trees he'd got to cut or lose his job or his reputation or something. I got 'em for him. The little beggar was so glad he gave me a hundred, and I played it on the twelve at Rafferty's—there were twelve trees—and the twelve came. They wouldn't let me bet again, so I came up to Manila."
"Hell," said the aged young man apathetically, "what's thirty-six hundred? I could cash up that myself."
"And," said the other man, speaking through motionless lips, "the lucky devil struck Manila just when that tin-horn Haines had sold a mine down Mindanao way. Haines got to working his bellows out to the Country Club, wanting to back the wheel, no limit, and Billy took him up and played the twelve, and the twelve came up—twice running. That's all."