“If it’s a fist fight you want to back me for,” said the Kid, “don’t put your money up yet.  Make it gun work, and I’ll keep you company.  But no barehanded scrapping, like ladies at a tea-party, for me.”

“It’s easier than that,” said Thacker.  “Just step here, will you?”

Through the window he pointed to a two-story white-stuccoed house with wide galleries rising amid the deep-green tropical foliage on a wooded hill that sloped gently from the sea.

“In that house,” said Thacker, “a fine old Castilian gentleman and his wife are yearning to gather you into their arms and fill your pockets with money.  Old Santos Urique lives there.  He owns half the gold-mines in the country.”

“You haven’t been eating loco weed, have you?” asked the Kid.

“Sit down again,” said Thacker, “and I’ll tell you.  Twelve years ago they lost a kid.  No, he didn’t die—­although most of ’em here do from drinking the surface water.  He was a wild little devil, even if he wasn’t but eight years old.  Everybody knows about it.  Some Americans who were through here prospecting for gold had letters to Senor Urique, and the boy was a favorite with them.  They filled his head with big stories about the States; and about a month after they left, the kid disappeared, too.  He was supposed to have stowed himself away among the banana bunches on a fruit steamer, and gone to New Orleans.  He was seen once afterward in Texas, it was thought, but they never heard anything more of him.  Old Urique has spent thousands of dollars having him looked for.  The madam was broken up worst of all.  The kid was her life.  She wears mourning yet.  But they say she believes he’ll come back to her some day, and never gives up hope.  On the back of the boy’s left hand was tattooed a flying eagle carrying a spear in his claws.  That’s old Urique’s coat of arms or something that he inherited in Spain.”

The Kid raised his left hand slowly and gazed at it curiously.

“That’s it,” said Thacker, reaching behind the official desk for his bottle of smuggled brandy.  “You’re not so slow.  I can do it.  What was I consul at Sandakan for?  I never knew till now.  In a week I’ll have the eagle bird with the frog-sticker blended in so you’d think you were born with it.  I brought a set of the needles and ink just because I was sure you’d drop in some day, Mr. Dalton.”

“Oh, hell,” said the Kid.  “I thought I told you my name!”

“All right, ‘Kid,’ then.  It won’t be that long.  How does Senorito Urique sound, for a change?”

“I never played son any that I remember of,” said the Kid.  “If I had any parents to mention they went over the divide about the time I gave my first bleat.  What is the plan of your round-up?”

Thacker leaned back against the wall and held his glass up to the light.

“We’ve come now,” said he, “to the question of how far you’re willing to go in a little matter of the sort.”