"Burned to the ground," I announced.

"Do you remember Jim Wan?" he came back at me.

"Dead," I said; but who the devil Jim Wan was I hadn't the slightest
idea.

I was on thin ice again.

"Do you remember Billy Harper, at Shanghai?" I queried back at him
quickly.

That aged sailorman worked hard to recollect, but the Billy Harper of
my imagination was beyond his faded memory.

"Of course you remember Billy Harper," I insisted. "Everybody knows
him. He's been there forty years. Well, he's still there, that's all."

And then the miracle happened. The sailorman remembered Billy Harper.
Perhaps there was a Billy Harper, and perhaps he had been in Shanghai
for forty years and was still there; but it was news to me.

For fully half an hour longer, the sailorman and I talked on in
similar fashion. In the end he told the policemen that I was what I
represented myself to be, and after a night's lodging and a breakfast
I was released to wander on westward to my married sister in San
Francisco.

But to return to the woman in Reno who opened her door to me in the