“Me give ’m five stick,” the six-quart steward bargained.  “Suppose ’m you no like ’m five stick then you fella boy go to hell close up.”

There was a silence.

“You like ’m five stick?” Daughtry insisted of the dark interior.

“Me like ’m,” the darkness answered, and through the darkness the body that owned the voice approached with such strange sounds that the steward lighted a match to see.

A blear-eyed ancient stood before him, balancing on a single crutch.  His eyes were half-filmed over by a growth of morbid membrane, and what was not yet covered shone red and irritated.  His hair was mangy, standing out in isolated patches of wispy grey.  His skin was scarred and wrinkled and mottled, and in colour was a purplish blue surfaced with a grey coating that might have been painted there had it not indubitably grown there and been part and parcel of him.

A blighted leper—­was Daughtry’s thought as his quick eyes leapt from hands to feet in quest of missing toe- and finger-joints.  But in those items the ancient was intact, although one leg ceased midway between knee and thigh.

“My word!  What place stop ’m that fella leg?” quoth Daughtry, pointing to the space which the member would have occupied had it not been absent.

“Big fella shark-fish, that fella leg stop ’m along him,” the ancient grinned, exposing a horrible aperture of toothlessness for a mouth.

“Me old fella boy too much,” the one-legged Methuselah quavered.  “Long time too much no smoke ’m tobacco.  Suppose ’m you big fella white marster give ’m me one fella stick, close up me washee-washee you that fella steamer.”

“Suppose ’m me no give?” the steward impatiently temporized.

For reply, the old man half-turned, and, on his crutch, swinging his stump of leg in the air, began sidling hippity-hop into the grass hut.

“All right,” Daughtry cried hastily.  “Me give ’m you smoke ’m quick fella.”

He dipped into a side coat-pocket for the mintage of the Solomons and stripped off a stick from the handful of pressed sticks.  The old man was transfigured as he reached avidly for the stick and received it.  He uttered little crooning noises, alternating with sharp cries akin to pain, half-ecstatic, half-petulant, as he drew a black clay pipe from a hole in his ear-lobe, and into the bowl of it, with trembling fingers, untwisted and crumbled the cheap leaf of spoiled Virginia crop.

Pressing down the contents of the full bowl with his thumb, he suddenly plumped upon the ground, the crutch beside him, the one limb under him so that he had the seeming of a legless torso.  From a small bag of twisted coconut hanging from his neck upon his withered and sunken chest, he drew out flint and steel and tinder, and, even while the impatient steward was proffering him a box of matches, struck a spark, caught it in the tinder, blew it into strength and quantity, and lighted his pipe from it.