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“There wasn’t a man but had a kind thought for him as he left, and there was rain in the eyes of more than one A.B. Well, from that day he disappeared, and no one has seen him since. God knows where he is; but I was thinking, as I looked out there to the setting sun, that his wild spirit would naturally turn to the South, for civilised places had no charm for him.”

“I never knew quite why he had to leave the Navy.”

“He opened fire on a French frigate off Tahiti which was boring holes in an opium smuggler.”

Mostyn laughed. “Of course; and how like Ted it was–an instinct to side with the weakest.”

“Yes, coupled with the fact that the Frenchman’s act was mere brutality, and had not sufficient motive or justification. So Ted pitched into him.”

“Did the smuggler fly the British flag?”

“No, the American; and it was only the intervention of the United States which prevented serious international trouble. Out of the affair came Ted a shipwreck.”

“Have you never got on his track?”

“Once I thought I had at Singapore, but nothing came of it. No doubt he changed his name. He never asked for, never got, the legacy my poor father left him.”

“What was it made you think you had come across him at Singapore?”

“Oh, certain significant things.”

“What was he doing?”

Debney looked at his old friend for a moment debatingly, then said quietly: “Slave-dealing, and doing it successfully, under the noses of men-of-war of all nations.”

“But you decided it was not he after all?”

“I doubted. If Ted came to that, he would do it in a very big way. It would appeal to him on some grand scale, with real danger and, say, a few scores of thousands of pounds at stake–not unless.”

Mostyn lit a cigar, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, regarded the scene before him with genial meditation–the creamy wash of the sea at their feet, the surface of the water like corrugated silver stretching to the farther sky, with that long lane of golden light crossing it to the sun, Alcatras, Angel Island, Saucilito, the rocky fortresses, and the men-of-war in the harbour, on one of which flew the British ensign–the Cormorant, commanded by Debney.

“Poor Ted!” said Mostyn at last; “he might have been anything.”

“Let us get back to the Cormorant,” responded Debney sadly. “And see, old chap, when you get back to England, I wish you’d visit my mother for me, for I shall not see her for another year, and she’s always anxious–always since Ted left.”

Mostyn grasped the other’s hand, and said: “It’s the second thing I’ll do on landing, my boy.”

Then they talked of other things, but as they turned at the Presidio for a last look at the Golden Gate, Mostyn said musingly: “I wonder how many millions’ worth of smuggled opium have come in that open door?”

Debney shrugged a shoulder. “Try Nob Hill, Fifth Avenue, and the Champs Elysees. What does a poor man-o’-war’s-man know of such things?”

An hour later they were aboard the Cormorant dining with a number of men asked to come and say good-bye to Mostyn, who was starting for England the second day following, after a pleasant cruise with Debney.

Meanwhile, from far beyond that yellow lane of light running out from Golden Gate, there came a vessel, sailing straight for harbour. She was an old-fashioned cruiser, carrying guns, and when she passed another vessel she hoisted the British flag. She looked like a half-obsolete corvette, spruced up, made modern by every possible device, and all her appointments were shapely and in order. She was clearly a British man-of-war, as shown in her trim-dressed sailors, her good handful of marines; but her second and third lieutenants seemed little like Englishmen. There was gun-drill and cutlass-drill every day, and, what was also singular, there was boat-drill twice a day, so that the crew of this man-of-war, as they saw Golden Gate ahead of them, were perhaps more expert at boat-drill than any that sailed. They could lower and raise a boat with a wonderful expertness in a bad sea, and they rowed with clock-like precision and machine-like force.