“You low Yankee fiend—­I’ll pay you off some day.

“Cloete passes by with a damn bitter laugh, because he thinks that the fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it.”

My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his black, sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.

“I don’t quite understand this,” I said.  “In what way?”

He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that Captain Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it.  Enough to keep her comfortable.  George Dunbar’s half, as Cloete feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.

“I am curious,” I said, “to learn what the motive force of this tragic affair was—­I mean the patent medicine.  Do you know?”

He named it, and I whistled respectfully.  Nothing less than Parker’s Lively Lumbago Pills.  Enormous property!  You know it; all the world knows it.  Every second man, at least, on this globe of ours has tried it.

“Why!” I cried, “they missed an immense fortune.”

“Yes,” he mumbled, “by the price of a revolver-shot.”

He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States, passenger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock.  The night before he sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for a drink.  “Funny chap, Cloete.  We sat all night drinking grogs, till it was time for him to go on board.”

It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this story, with that utterly unconscious frankness of a patent-medicine man stranger to all moral standards.  Cloete concluded by remarking that he, had “had enough of the old country.”  George Dunbar had turned on him, too, in the end.  Cloete was clearly somewhat disillusioned.

As to Stafford, he died, professed loafer, in some East End hospital or other, and on his last day clamoured “for a parson,” because his conscience worried him for killing an innocent man.  “Wanted somebody to tell him it was all right,” growled my old ruffian, contemptuously.  “He told the parson that I knew this Cloete who had tried to murder him, and so the parson (he worked among the dock labourers) once spoke to me about it.  That skunk of a fellow finding himself trapped yelled for mercy. . .  Promised to be good and so on. . .  Then he went crazy . . . screamed and threw himself about, beat his head against the bulkheads . . . you can guess all that—­eh? . . . till he was exhausted.  Gave up.  Threw himself down, shut his eyes, and wanted to pray.  So he says.  Tried to think of some prayer for a quick death—­he was that terrified.  Thought that if he had a knife or something he would cut his throat, and be done with it.  Then he thinks:  No!