I was desperate. Disaster stalked before me incarnate in the form of
that gold-ear-ringed, weather-beaten son of the sea. Who was he? What
was he? I must solve him ere he solved me. I must take a new
orientation, or else those wicked policemen would orientate me to a
cell, a police court, and more cells. If he questioned me first,
before I knew how much he knew, I was lost.

But did I betray my desperate plight to those lynx-eyed guardians of
the public welfare of Winnipeg? Not I. I met that aged sailorman
glad-eyed and beaming, with all the simulated relief at deliverance
that a drowning man would display on finding a life-preserver in his
last despairing clutch. Here was a man who understood and who would
verify my true story to the faces of those sleuth-hounds who did not
understand, or, at least, such was what I endeavored to play-act. I
seized upon him; I volleyed him with questions about himself. Before
my judges I would prove the character of my savior before he saved me.

He was a kindly sailorman--an "easy mark." The policemen grew
impatient while I questioned him. At last one of them told me to shut
up. I shut up; but while I remained shut up, I was busy creating, busy
sketching the scenario of the next act. I had learned enough to go on
with. He was a Frenchman. He had sailed always on French merchant
vessels, with the one exception of a voyage on a "lime-juicer." And
last of all--blessed fact!--he had not been on the sea for twenty
years.

The policeman urged him on to examine me.

"You called in at Rangoon?" he queried.