“And, true enough, he vanished from Sydney before long, after some trouble with the Excise fellows about his stock.  Goods stolen out of a warehouse or something similar.  He left the woman behind, but he must have secured some sort of companion—­he could not have shifted for himself; but whom he went away with, and where, and what other companions he might have picked up afterwards, it is impossible to make the remotest guess about.

“Why exactly he came this way I can’t tell.  Towards the end of my time here we began to hear talk of a maimed Frenchman who had been seen here and there.  But no one knew then that he had foregathered with Niclaus and lived in his prau.  I daresay he put Niclaus up to a thing or two.  Anyhow, it was a partnership.  Niclaus was somewhat afraid of the Frenchman on account of his tempers, which were awful.  He looked then like a devil; but a man without hands, unable to load or handle a weapon, can at best go for one only with his teeth.  From that danger Niclaus felt certain he could always defend himself.

“The couple were alone together loafing in the common-room of that infamous hotel when Fector turned up.  After some beating about the bush, for he was doubtful how far he could trust these two, he repeated what he had overheard in the tiffin-rooms.

“His tale did not have much success till he came to mention the creek and Bamtz’s name.  Niclaus, sailing about like a native in a prau, was, in his own words, ‘familiar with the locality.’  The huge Frenchman, walking up and down the room with his stumps in the pockets of his jacket, stopped short in surprise.  ’Comment?  Bamtz!  Bamtz!’

“He had run across him several times in his life.  He exclaimed:  ‘Bamtz!  Mais je ne connais que ca!’ And he applied such a contemptuously indecent epithet to Bamtz that when, later, he alluded to him as ‘une chiffe’ (a mere rag) it sounded quite complimentary.  ‘We can do with him what we like,’ he asserted confidently.  ’Oh, yes.  Certainly we must hasten to pay a visit to that—­’ (another awful descriptive epithet quite unfit for repetition).  ’Devil take me if we don’t pull off a coup that will set us all up for a long time.’

“He saw all that lot of dollars melted into bars and disposed of somewhere on the China coast.  Of the escape after the coup he never doubted.  There was Niclaus’s prau to manage that in.

“In his enthusiasm he pulled his stumps out of his pockets and waved them about.  Then, catching sight of them, as it were, he held them in front of his eyes, cursing and blaspheming and bewailing his misfortune and his helplessness, till Niclaus quieted him down.

“But it was his mind that planned out the affair and it was his spirit which carried the other two on.  Neither of them was of the bold buccaneer type; and Fector, especially, had never in his adventurous life used other weapons than slander and lies.