a wolf!' yaps Jones. You know his style, a gun in his belt, fringes on
his moccasins, and long hair down his back. 'I'm a wolf,' he yaps, 'an'
this is my night to howl. Hear me, you long lean makeshift of a human
critter?'--an' this to Husky Travers."

"Well?" the other voice queried, after a pause.

"In about a second an' a half Oily Jones was on the floor an' Husky on
top askin' somebody kindly to pass him a butcher knife. What's he do but
plumb hack off all of Oily Jones' long hair. 'Now howl, damn you, howl,'
says Husky, gettin' up."

"He was a cool one, for a wild one," the first voice took up. "I seen
him buck roulette in the Little Wolverine, drop nine thousand in two
hours, borrow some more, win it back in fifteen minutes, buy the drinks,
an' cash in--dang me, all in fifteen minutes."

One evening Tom was unusually brightly awake, and Frederick, joining the
rapt young circle, sat and listened to his brother's serio-comic
narrative of the night of wreck on the island of Blang; of the swim
through the sharks where half the crew was lost; of the great pearl
which Desay brought ashore with him; of the head-decorated palisade that
surrounded the grass palace wherein dwelt the Malay queen with her royal
consort, a shipwrecked Chinese Eurasian; of the intrigue for the pearl
of Desay; of mad feasts and dances in the barbaric night, and quick
dangers and sudden deaths; of the queen's love-making to Desay, of
Desay's love-making to the queen's daughter, and of Desay, every joint
crushed, still alive, staked out on the reef at low tide to be eaten by
the sharks; of the coming of the plague; of the beating of tom-toms and
the exorcising of the devil-devil doctors; of the flight over the