第57章

"All this happened about two years before the day when Davidson, sitting in this very room, talked to my friend.You will see presently how this room can get full.Every seat'll be occupied, and as you notice, the tables are set close, so that the backs of the chairs are almost touching.There is also a good deal of noisy talk here about one o'clock.

"I don't suppose Davidson was talking very loudly; but very likely he had to raise his voice across the table to my friend.And here accident, mere accident, put in its work by providing a pair of fine ears close behind Davidson's chair.It was ten to one against, the owner of the same having enough change in his pockets to get his tiffin here.But he had.Most likely had rooked somebody of a few dollars at cards overnight.He was a bright creature of the name of Fector, a spare, short, jumpy fellow with a red face and muddy eyes.He described himself as a journalist as certain kind of women give themselves out as actresses in the dock of a police-court.

"He used to introduce himself to strangers as a man with a mission to track out abuses and fight them whenever found.He would also hint that he was a martyr.And it's a fact that he had been kicked, horsewhipped, imprisoned, and hounded with ignominy out of pretty well every place between Ceylon and Shanghai, for a professional blackmailer.

"I suppose, in that trade, you've got to have active wits and sharp ears.It's not likely that he overheard every word Davidson said about his dollar collecting trip, but he heard enough to set his wits at work.

"He let Davidson go out, and then hastened away down to the native slums to a sort of lodging-house kept in partnership by the usual sort of Portuguese and a very disreputable Chinaman.Macao Hotel, it was called, but it was mostly a gambling den that one used to warn fellows against.Perhaps you remember?

"There, the evening before, Fector had met a precious couple, a partnership even more queer than the Portuguese and the Chinaman.

One of the two was Niclaus - you know.Why! the fellow with a Tartar moustache and a yellow complexion, like a Mongolian, only that his eyes were set straight and his face was not so flat.One couldn't tell what breed he was.A nondescript beggar.From a certain angle you would think a very bilious white man.And Idaresay he was.He owned a Malay prau and called himself The Nakhoda, as one would say: The Captain.Aha! Now you remember.

He couldn't, apparently, speak any other European language than English, but he flew the Dutch flag on his prau.

"The other was the Frenchman without hands.Yes.The very same we used to know in '79 in Sydney, keeping a little tobacco shop at the lower end of George Street.You remember the huge carcase hunched up behind the counter, the big white face and the long black hair brushed back off a high forehead like a bard's.He was always trying to roll cigarettes on his knee with his stumps, telling endless yarns of Polynesia and whining and cursing in turn about 'MON MALHEUR.' His hands had been blown away by a dynamite cartridge while fishing in some lagoon.This accident, I believe, had made him more wicked than before, which is saying a good deal.

"He was always talking about 'resuming his activities' some day, whatever they were, if he could only get an intelligent companion.

It was evident that the little shop was no field for his activities, and the sickly woman with her face tied up, who used to look in sometimes through the back door, was no companion for him.

"And, true enough, he vanished from Sydney before long, after some trouble with the Excise fellows about his stock.Goods stolen out of a warehouse or something similar.He left the woman behind, but he must have secured some sort of companion - he could not have shifted for himself; but whom he went away with, and where, and what other companions he might have picked up afterwards, it is impossible to make the remotest guess about.

"Why exactly he came this way I can't tell.Towards the end of my time here we began to hear talk of a maimed Frenchman who had been seen here and there.But no one knew then that he had foregathered with Niclaus and lived in his prau.I daresay he put Niclaus up to a thing or two.Anyhow, it was a partnership.Niclaus was somewhat afraid of the Frenchman on account of his tempers, which were awful.He looked then like a devil; but a man without hands, unable to load or handle a weapon, can at best go for one only with his teeth.From that danger Niclaus felt certain he could always defend himself.

"The couple were alone together loafing in the common-room of that infamous hotel when Fector turned up.After some beating about the bush, for he was doubtful how far he could trust these two, he repeated what he had overheard in the tiffin-rooms.

"His tale did not have much success till he came to mention the creek and Bamtz's name.Niclaus, sailing about like a native in a prau, was, in his own words, 'familiar with the locality.' The huge Frenchman, walking up and down the room with his stumps in the pockets of his jacket, stopped short in surprise.'COMMENT?

BAMTZ! BAMTZ!'

"He had run across him several times in his life.He exclaimed:

'BAMTZ! MAIS JE NE CONNAIS QUE CA!' And he applied such a contemptuously indecent epithet to Bamtz that when, later, he alluded to him as 'UNE CHIFFE' (a mere rag) it sounded quite complimentary.'We can do with him what we like,' he asserted confidently.'Oh, yes.Certainly we must hasten to pay a visit to that - ' (another awful descriptive epithet quite unfit for repetition).'Devil take me if we don't pull off a coup that will set us all up for a long time.'

"He saw all that lot of dollars melted into bars and disposed of somewhere on the China coast.Of the escape after the COUP he never doubted.There was Niclaus's prau to manage that in.