"No names, no court-martials!" he quoted.
He drank from his pannikin again.
"Call me Adams!" he said.
There was a moment's silence. The sick man moved restlessly on his rustling couch and I heard his teeth rattle in his head. Outside, the pulsating life of the negro quarter shattered the brooding stillness of the tropical night. The sound of low, full-throated laughter, mingling with the jangling of guitars, drifted up from the lane.
"Broken as a major," the sick man said abruptly. "A bad business, very. Yes, they jailed me over it. And when I came out it was to find every man's hand against me. It's been against me ever since! Ah, it's a bad thing to make an enemy of England! When I think of the humble pie I've eaten from some of these blasted counter-jumping finnicking consuls of ours along this coast only to be thrown out of doors at last by their Dago servants! Once go down and out in England, and God help you! You'll never come back! Ah! it's not your own folk who'll lend you a hand then. It's the humble people, like Luisa here on whom I sponge, who keeps me, Okewood, who is proud to keep me...."
His voice quavered and broke. Tears welled up in his sunken eyes. One hates to see a man break down, so I looked away. And the beachcomber went to his pannikin for solace.
"That day at the calaboose at San Salvador," he said presently, "I wanted to tell you who I was. Twenty-five years ago I buried my real name. But what you did for me.... well, it was a white thing to do. I wanted to say to you: 'Race tells, sir! You have helped one of your own breed and upbringing.' It shall be written in our family records that 'Such-a-one (meaning myself) of Blank in the County of So-and-So, being in sore distress in the hands of the foreigner, was succoured by the chivalrous intervention of Major Desmond Okewood.'"
He sighed, then added:—
"But I doubt if you would have understood my meaning!"
I found myself becoming extraordinarily interested in this grotesque wastrel who, though sunk to the lowest depths a man may touch, managed to cling so desperately to his pride of birth.