Elliott found the atmosphere on the big Peninsular and Oriental liner different from anything he had ever encountered before. The ship was full of Anglo-Indian people, army officers, civil servants, and merchants returning to the East, and whose conversation was composed of English slang and exotic phrases of a foreign tongue. The crew were mostly Lascars of intolerable filthiness¹, and there were innumerable Indian maids—ayahs, Elliott supposed them to be—whom he met continually about the ship on mysterious errands of comfort to their mistresses. There were queer dishes at dinner, where Elliott made himself disagreeably conspicuous² on the first evening by wearing a sack coat; and the talk ran upon subjects which he had previously³ encountered only in the works of Mr. Kipling.  
Most of these passengers had come on board at Southampton and had settled so comfortably together that Elliott felt himself an intruder. He was distinctly an “outsider;” and he found it hard to scrape acquaintance with these healthy, well-set-up and apparently⁴ simple-minded young Englishmen, who seemed too candid⁵ to be natural. It was even more impossible to know how to approach the peppery veterans, who nevertheless were seen to converse⁶ jovially⁷ enough with folk of their own sort. He was distinctly lonely; he was almost homesick. His mind was perplexed⁸ with the object of his voyage, of which he felt the responsibility to a painful degree, so there were few things in his life which he ever enjoyed less than the passage from Brindisi to Alexandria.
 
At Port Said another half-dozen passengers came on board. Elliott took them all to be English, apparently of the tourist class, travelling around the world on circular tickets. One of them was sent to share Elliott’s stateroom, much to his annoyance⁹, but the man proved to be entirely¹⁰ inoffensive, a dull, respectable green-grocer with the strict principles of his London suburb, who was taking his daughter on a long southern sea voyage by medical advice. His sole desire was to return to his early radishes, and he spent almost all his waking hours in sitting dumbly beside his daughter on the after deck, a slight, pale girl of twenty, whose incessant¹¹ cough sounded as if sea air had been prescribed too late.
 
It was very hot as the steamer pushed at a snail’s pace through the canal. The illimitable reaches of honey-coloured sand seemed to gather up the fierce sun-rays and focus them on the ship. The awnings¹² from stem to stern afforded little relief, and the frilled punkahs sweeping¹³ the saloon tables only stirred the heated air. At night the ship threw a portentous¹⁴ glare ahead from the gigantic search-light furnished by the Canal Company, and in the close staterooms it was impossible to sleep. Many of the men walked the deck or dozed¹⁵ in long chairs, and at daybreak there was an undress parade when the imperturbable¹⁶ Lascars turned the hose on a couple of dozen passengers lined against the rail. Then there was a little coolness and it was possible to think of breakfast, before the African sun became again a flaming menace.
 
It was scarcely better when they reached the Red Sea, where, however, they were able to move at better speed. They had nearly completed this Biblical transit¹⁷, when a mirage¹⁸ of white-capped mountains floating aerially upside down appeared over the red desert in the south, and all the passengers crowded to the starboard rail to look at it. Elliott had moved to the bow, and was staring idly at the strangely coloured low coast, red and pink and orange, spotted¹⁹ with crags of basalt as black as iron.
 
“It would remind a man of Arizona, wouldn’t it?” a voice drawled languidly at his elbow.
 
Elliott wheeled, a little startled. Leaning on the rail beside him was a young man whom he remembered as having come aboard at Port Said with the globe-trotters. He was attired²⁰ in white flannels²¹ and wore a peaked cap, but the voice was unmistakably American, and Elliott felt certain that it had been developed south of the Ohio River.
 
“I never was in Arizona, but I’ve seen the same kind of thing in New Mexico,” he answered. “How did you know that I had been in the Southwest?”
 
“There’s nothing but the Bad Lands that’ll give a man that far-away pucker²² about the eyes,” said the other. “And anybody could pick you out for an American among all these Britishers. We’re the only Yankees on board, I reckon. I don’t mind calling myself a Yankee here, but I wouldn’t at home. I’m from Alabama, sir.”
 
“I thought you were from the South. I’m a Marylander myself,” replied Elliott.
 
“Is that so? I’m mighty²³ glad to hear it. We’ll have to moisten that—two Southerners so far from home. My name is Sevier.”
 
Elliott gave his name in return, and permitted himself to be led aft. He looked more closely at his new acquaintance as they sat down at a table in the stuffy²⁴ cubby-hole that passes for a smoking-room on the Indian mail-steamers. Sevier was a boyish-looking fellow of perhaps thirty, short, slight, and dark, with a small dark moustache, and a manner that was inexpressibly candid and ingratiating. In time it might come to seem smooth to the point of nausea²⁵; at present it appeared offhand²⁶ enough, and yet courteous—a manner of which the South alone has preserved the secret—and Elliott in his growing loneliness was delighted to find so agreeable a fellow traveller.
 
The talk naturally fell upon Southern matters, drifted to the West and South again to Mexico and the Gulf²⁷. Sevier seemed to display an unusual knowledge of these localities, though Elliott was unable to check his statements, and he explained that he had been a newspaper correspondent in Central America for a New Orleans daily, the Globe.
 
“The Globe?” exclaimed Elliott, recollecting²⁸ almost forgotten names. “Then you must know Jackson, the night editor. I used to work with him in Denver.”
 
“I’ve met him. But, you see, I was hardly ever in the office, nor in the city, either. I always worked on the outside.”
 
“The Globe had a man in San Salvador last year, named Wilcox, I think,” Elliott continued, recalling another fact.
 
“Yes. I reckon he was before me. San Salvador—I sunk a heap of money there!”
 
“Mining?”
 
“Yes—or not exactly actually mining. I got a concession²⁹ for a sulphur mine, and I was going to sell it in New York. It was a mighty good mine, too. There would have been dollars in it, and it cost me five thousand to get it. You know how concessions³⁰ are got down there, I expect?”
 
“How did it pan out?”
 
“It never panned out at all, sir. There was a revolution next month, and the new government annulled³¹ everything the old one had done. I hadn’t the money to go through the business over again, but I did make something out of the revolution, after all.”
 
“How?”
 
“Selling rifles to the revolutionists. I didn’t think at the time that I was helping³² to beat my own game. There’s money in revolutionizing, too. Down there a man can’t keep clear of graft³³, you know; it’s in the air.”
 
In spite of the apologetic tone of the last sentence, Elliott recognized the mental attitude of the adventurer, which was becoming very familiar to him. He had heard a good deal from Henninger of the business of supplying a revolution with war material, in which Henninger had participated more than once. As often as not, it is done by buying up the officers of a ragged³⁴ government regiment³⁵, and transferring, sometimes not only the rifles and cartridges³⁶ but also the officers and men as well, to the equally ragged force in opposition³⁷.
 
But if Sevier were an adventurer he was certainly the smoothest specimen³⁸ of the fraternity that Elliott had yet encountered. And why should such a man be going to India, surely a............