When I had made up my mind about this I watched only the other two, Adam Bailey and Bill Sloggs, trying to make out which was the master mind; and for a long while I could not.  And then I heard Adam Bailey mutter six words, the only words I heard throughout the game, of all their consultations, “No, him with the horse’s head.”  And I decided that Adam Bailey did not know what a knight was, though of course he might have been explaining things to Bill Sloggs, but it did not sound like that; so that left Bill Sloggs.  I watched Bill Sloggs after that with a certain wonder; he was no more intellectual than the others to look at, though rather more forceful perhaps.  Poor old Stavlokratz was beaten again.

Well, in the end I paid for Stavlokratz, and tried to get a game with Bill Sloggs alone, but this he would not agree to, it must be all three or none:  and then I went back with Stavlokratz to his lodgings.  He very kindly gave me a game:  of course it did not last long but I am prouder of having been beaten by Stavlokratz than of any game that I have ever won.  And then we talked for an hour about the sailors, and neither of us could make head or tail of them.  I told him what I had noticed about Jim Bunion and Adam Bailey, and he agreed with me that Bill Sloggs was the man, though as to how he had come by that gambit or that variation of Stavlokratz’s own opening he had no theory.

I had the sailors’ address which was that tavern as much as anywhere, and they were to be there all evening.  As evening drew in I went back to the tavern, and found there still the three sailors.  And I offered Bill Sloggs two pounds for a game with him alone and he refused, but in the end he played me for a drink.  And then I found that he had not heard of the “en passant” rule, and believed that the fact of checking the king prevented him from castling, and did not know that a player can have two or more queens on the board at the same time if he queens his pawns, or that a pawn could ever become a knight; and he made as many of the stock mistakes as he had time for in a short game, which I won.  I thought that I should have got at the secret then, but his mates who had sat scowling all the while in the corner came up and interfered.  It was a breach of their compact apparently for one to play by himself, at any rate they seemed angry.  So I left the tavern then and came back again next day, and the next day and the day after, and often saw the sailors, but none were in a communicative mood.  I had got Stavlokratz to keep away, and they could get no one to play chess with at a pound a side, and I would not play with them unless they told me the secret.

And then one evening I found Jim Bunion drunk, yet not so drunk as he wished, for the two pounds were spent; and I gave him very nearly a tumbler of whiskey, or what passed for whiskey in that tavern at Over, and he told me the secret at once.  I had given the others some whiskey to keep them quiet, and later on in the evening they must have gone out, but Jim Bunion stayed with me by a little table leaning across it and talking low, right into my face, his breath smelling all the while of what passed for whiskey.