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Guy’s freckled fingers worked at the belt’s pockets. Green banknotes slid out, coins rolled out to be bogged by the paper, green notes rustled out to bury the coins.

“Oh, Guy!” she gasped. “All that?”

He chuckled, jiggling her on his knees, and fluttered the green notes up from the table like a child playing with fallen leaves.

“All that. And every one of ’em cost a pint of somebody’s pink blood. Maybe they look cool and green to you, but I’m telling you every last one of ’em is as hot a red as the streets of Colombo, if you could only see it.”

She refused to shudder under the laugh in his red-veined eyes, laughed, and stretched a tentative finger to the nearest note.

“How much is there, Guy?”

“I don’t know. I took ’em moving,” he boasted. “No time for bookkeeping. It was bing, bang, get clear and step in again. We dyed the Yodaela red that one night. Mud under, darkness over, rain everywhere, with a brown devil for every raindrop. A pith helmet hunting for us with a flashlight that never found anything but a stiff-necked Buddha up on a rock before we put it out of business.”

The “stiff-necked Buddha” brought Doucas’s face to Margaret.

“Oh! There was a man here to see you last week. He’s waiting to see you at the hotel. His name is Doucas, a very stout man with —”

“The Greek!”

Guy Tharp put his wife off his knees. He put her off neither hastily nor roughly, but with that deliberate withdrawal of attention which is the toy’s lot when serious work is at hand.

“What else did he have to say?”

“That was all, except that he was a friend of yours. It was early in the morning, and I found him in the kitchen, and I know he had been upstairs. Who is he, Guy?”

“A fellow,” her husband said vaguely around the knuckle he bit. He seemed to attach no importance to, not even be interested by, the news that Doucas had come furtively into his house. “Seen him since then?”

“Not to talk to, but I see him every time I pass the hotel.”

Guy took the knuckle from between his teeth, rubbed his chin with a thumb, hunched his thick shoulders, let them fall lax, and reached for Margaret. Slumped comfortably in his chair, holding her tight to him with hard arms, he fell to laughing, teasing, boasting again, his voice a mellow, deep-bodied rumble under her head. But his eyes did not pale to their normal sapphire. Behind jest and chuckle an aloof thoughtfulness seemed to stand.

Asleep that night, he slept with the soundness of child or animal, but she knew he had been long going to sleep.

Just before daylight she crept out of bed and carried the money into another room to count it. Twelve thousand dollars were there.

In the morning Guy was merry, full of laughter and words that had no alien seriousness behind them. He had stories to tell of a brawl in a Madras street, or another in a gaming house in Saigon; of a Finn, met in the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, who was having a giant raft towed to a spot in mid-Pacific where he thought he could live with least annoyance from the noise of the earth’s spinning.

Guy talked, laughed, and ate breakfast with the heartiness of one who does not ordinarily know when he will eat again. The meal done, he lit a black cigar and stood up. “Reckon I’ll trot down the hill for a visit with your friend Leonidas, and see what’s on his mind.”

When he mauled her to his chest to kiss her, she felt the bulk of a revolver bolstered under his coat. She went to a front window to watch him go away from the house. He swaggered carelessly down the hill, shoulders swinging, whistling, ‘Bang Away, My Lulu.’