look like a steer, didn't it, old hoss?"




VII

PHOEBE


"You are a man of many novel adventures and varied enterprises," I
said to Captain Patricio Maloné. "Do you believe that the possible
element of good luck or bad luck--if there is such a thing as
luck--has influenced your career or persisted for or against you
to such an extent that you were forced to attribute results to the
operation of the aforesaid good luck or bad luck?"

This question (of almost the dull insolence of legal phraseology)
was put while we sat in Rousselin's little red-tiled café near Congo
Square in New Orleans.

Brown-faced, white-hatted, finger-ringed captains of adventure came
often to Rousselin's for the cognac. They came from sea and land,
and were chary of relating the things they had seen--not because
they were more wonderful than the fantasies of the Ananiases of
print, but because they were so different. And I was a perpetual
wedding-guest, always striving to cast my buttonhole over the finger
of one of these mariners of fortune. This Captain Maloné was a
Hiberno-Iberian creole who had gone to and fro in the earth and
walked up and down in it. He looked like any other well-dressed man