“Cowtops?” asked Carthew, “what are they?”

“That’s what Hallam would call feudal retainers,” explained Hadden, not without vainglory.  “They’re My Followers.  They belong to My Family.  I tell you, they come expensive, though; you can’t fill up all these retainers on tinned salmon for nothing; but whenever I could get it, I would give ’em squid.  Squid’s good for natives, but I don’t care for it, do you?—­or shark either.  It’s like the working classes at home.  With copra at the price it is, they ought to be willing to bear their share of the loss; and so I’ve told them again and again.  I think it’s a man’s duty to open their minds, and I try to, but you can’t get political economy into them; it doesn’t seem to reach their intelligence.”

There was an expression still sticking in Carthew’s memory, and he returned upon it with a smile.  “Talking of political economy,” said he, “you said if there were two of us to bear the expense, the profits would increase.  How do you make out that?”

“I’ll show you!  I’ll figure it out for you!” cried Hadden, and with a pencil on the back of the bill of fare proceeded to perform miracles.  He was a man, or let us rather say a lad, of unusual projective power.  Give him the faintest hint of any speculation, and the figures flowed from him by the page.  A lively imagination and a ready though inaccurate memory supplied his data; he delivered himself with an inimitable heat that made him seem the picture of pugnacity; lavished contradiction; had a form of words, with or without significance, for every form of criticism; and the looker-on alternately smiled at his simplicity and fervour, or was amazed by his unexpected shrewdness.  He was a kind of Pinkerton in play.  I have called Jim’s the romance of business; this was its Arabian tale.

“Have you any idea what this would cost?” he asked, pausing at an item.

“Not I,” said Carthew.

“Ten pounds ought to be ample,” concluded the projector.

“O, nonsense!” cried Carthew.  “Fifty at the very least.”

“You told me yourself this moment you knew nothing about it!” cried Tommy.  “How can I make a calculation, if you blow hot and cold?  You don’t seem able to be serious!”

But he consented to raise his estimate to twenty; and a little after, the calculation coming out with a deficit, cut it down again to five pounds ten, with the remark, “I told you it was nonsense.  This sort of thing has to be done strictly, or where’s the use?”

Some of these processes struck Carthew as unsound; and he was at times altogether thrown out by the capricious startings of the prophet’s mind.  These plunges seemed to be gone into for exercise and by the way, like the curvets of a willing horse.  Gradually the thing took shape; the glittering if baseless edifice arose; and the hare still ran on the mountains, but the soup was already served in silver plate.  Carthew in a few days could command a