“Well, now, there’s a woman who illustrates just what I have been saying,” continued Carroll.  “You picked her out as a self-respecting, nice-looking girl—­and so she is—­but she wouldn’t like to have to tell all she knows.  No, they are all pretty much alike.  They wear low-neck frocks, and the men put on evening dress for dinner, and they ride after foxes, and they drop in to five-o’clock tea, and they all play that they’re a lot of gilded saints, and it’s one of the rules of the game that you must believe in the next man, so that he will believe in you.  I’m breaking the rules myself now, because I say ‘they’ when I ought to say ‘we.’  We’re none of us here for our health, Holcombe, but it pleases us to pretend we are.  It’s a sort of give and take.  We all sit around at dinner-parties and smile and chatter, and those English talk about the latest news from ‘town,’ and how they mean to run back for the season or the hunting.  But they know they don’t dare go back, and they know that everybody at the table knows it, and that the servants behind them know it.  But it’s more easy that way.  There’s only a few of us here, and we’ve got to hang together or we’d go crazy.”

“That’s so,” said Meakim, approvingly.  “It makes it more sociable.”

“It’s a funny place,” continued Carroll.  The wine had loosened his tongue, and it was something to him to be able to talk to one of his own people again, and to speak from their point of view, so that the man who had gone through St. Paul’s and Harvard with him would see it as such a man should.  “It’s a funny place, because, in spite of the fact that it’s a prison, you grow to like it for its freedom.  You can do things here you can’t do in New York, and pretty much everything goes there, or it used to, where I hung out.  But here you’re just your own master, and there’s no law and no religion and no relations nor newspapers to poke into what you do nor how you live.  You can understand what I mean if you’ve ever tried living in the West.  I used to feel the same way the year I was ranching in Texas.  My family sent me out there to put me out of temptation; but I concluded I’d rather drink myself to death on good whiskey at Del’s than on the stuff we got on the range, so I pulled my freight and came East again.  But while I was there I was a little king.  I was just as good as the next man, and he was no better than me.  And though the life was rough, and it was cold and lonely, there was something in being your own boss that made you stick it out there longer than anything else did.  It was like this, Holcombe.”  Carroll half rose from his chair and marked what he said with his finger.  “Every time I took a step and my gun bumped against my hip, I’d straighten up and feel good and look for trouble.  There was nobody to appeal to; it was just between me and him, and no one else had any say about it.  Well, that’s what it’s like here.  You see men come to Tangier on the run, flying from detectives or husbands or bank directors, men who have lived perfectly decent, commonplace lives up to the time they made their one bad break—­which,” Carroll added, in polite parenthesis, with a deprecatory wave of his hand toward Meakim and himself, “we are all likely to do some time, aren’t we?”