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had been turned around. Her attitude toward Dreadwind was one of implicit believing. It was distinctly not an attitude of seeing. She seemed to have no sense perception of him whatever.
    Her gaze never lingered upon him in the natural way of women. The fancy occurred to me that he would give the whole world, if he had it, to be touched by her once as I had seen her touch the tree. There was about them an air of living in suspense, of waiting together for an imminent thing that was taking its time.
    “There was a frugal dinner of rice and fruit. Conversation withered and died. Our words rattled about the room like seeds in a dry gourd. Such questions as how long they meant to stay, whether they liked it, and what it was they liked, were foreclosed by circumstances. I tried oil and he wasn’t interested; then descriptions of the country farther north where I had been and she at once betrayed symptoms of distress. Neither of them seemed in the least to care for the vocal amenities and we fell at length into utter silence. Presently she rose, thanked me for coming, shook hands again with a cool, firm handclasp, and said good night. He excused himself and retired with her, going, as I supposed, to the other part of the house.
    “He was uneasy in his mind when he returned, walked about a bit, then sat down and began to smoke, staring at the ceiling.
    “‘Mrs. Jones wishes it,’ he said. ‘Do you mind?’
    “‘Whatever it is,’ I said.
    “‘I think I told you she was particularly anxious that you should come,’ he said. ‘Just now she surprised me very much by asking me to tell you everything from the beginning—the whole story, I mean, of why we are here and how it came. She was sure you wouldn’t mind.’
    “‘She knew,’ I said.
    “He looked at me quickly. ‘She knows many things that cannot be learned,’ he said.
    “With that he began. I shall not try to reproduce his words. He left much to be filled in by the understanding, especially in those passages which dealt intimately with her. He was naturally an inarticulate person. I shall tell it broadly in the third person. If it isn’t always clear, interrupt me.”
    “Move it,” said Goran.
    “Did the shadow you speak of resemble Weaver?” Sylvester asked: “The girl’s father, I mean.”
    “As it were his own,” I said.
    “And now Dreadwind is talking?”
    “Yes. Only, as I’ve said, I shall not use his words. I undertake to tell you what he told me; and that was more than he uttered in syllables. The full strangeness of it occurred to me afterward. It occurs to me now—there through an Oriental night, in the land of the White Elephant and sacred python, to hear a man talking of the Chicago wheat pit, the American grain crop, Western Kansas, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, all these things leading to a haunted teak tree in the Burmese forest.”

CHAPTER II
    D READWIND was born in New York City. When he was thirteen he got a job as door boy in a Wall Street bucket shop, and his widowed mother supposed he had begun a career in banking. What begins in a bucket shop is a career in pure gambling. Pretending to be a broker, the proprietor of a bucket shop is the same as a race-track bookmaker or the keeper of a gambling house. People bet with him on the rise and fall of shares. If they guess wrong he wins their money. If a number of them happen to guess right he absconds. That is why the bucket shop is both immoral and illegal; why also the bucket shop fraternity is beyond the pale in Wall Street. Its members bear a stigma, like people of the underworld; they cannot be received in respectable financial society. They walk in the same thoroughfares; they eat and drink in the same restaurants. The unsophisticated eye is unable to see wherein they differ from respectability itself. Some of them are very likable to know, yet one shall not know them—that is, not without besmirching oneself with the stigma that is theirs.
    There Dreadwind