Thayer muttered in an undertone across to Naismith, while Dick and the girls were in the thick of exclamatory and giggling banter, “here’s some stuff for that article of yours, if you touch upon the Big House. I’ve seen the servants’ dining room. Forty head sit down to it every meal, including gardeners, chauffeurs, and outside help. It’s a boarding house in itself. Some head, some system, take it from me. That Chiney boy, Oh Joy, is a wooz. He’s housekeeper, or manager, of the whole shebang, or whatever you want to call his job – and, say, it runs that smooth you can’t hear it.”
“Forrest’s the real wooz,” Naismith nodded. “He’s the brains that picks brains. He could run an army, a campaign, a government, or even a three-ring circus.”
“Which last is some compliment,” Thayer concurred heartily.
“Oh, Paula,” Dick said across to his wife. “I just got word that Graham arrives to-morrow morning. Better tell Oh Joy to put him in the watch-tower. It’s man-size quarters, and it’s possible he may carry out his threat and work on his book.”
“Graham? – Graham?” Paula queried aloud of her memory. “Do I know him?”
“You met him once two years ago, in Santiago, at the Café Venus. He had dinner with us.”
“Oh, one of those naval officers?”
Dick shook his head.
“The civilian. Don’t you remember that big blond fellow – you talked music with him for half an hour while Captain Joyce talked our heads off to prove that the United States should clean Mexico up and out with the mailed fist.”
“Oh, to be sure,” Paula vaguely recollected. “He’d met you somewhere before… South Africa, wasn’t it? Or the Philippines?”
“That’s the chap. South Africa, it was. Evan Graham. Next time we met was on the Times dispatch boat on the Yellow Sea. And we crossed trails a dozen times after that, without meeting, until that night in the Café Venus.
“Heavens – he left Bora-Bora, going east, two days before I dropped anchor bound west on my way to Samoa. I came out of Apia, with letters for him from the American consul, the day before he came in. We missed each other by three days at Levuka – I was sailing the Wild Duck then. He pulled out of Suva as guest on a British cruiser. Sir Everard Im Thurm, British High Commissioner of the South Seas, gave me more letters for Graham. I missed him at Port Resolution and at Vila in the New Hebrides. The cruiser was junketing, you see. I beat her in and out of the Santa Cruz Group. It was the same thing in the Solomons. The cruiser, after shelling the cannibal villages at Langa-Langa, steamed out in the morning. I sailed in that afternoon. I never did deliver those letters in person, and the next time I laid eyes on him was at the Café Venus two years ago.”
“But who about him, and what about him?” Paula queried. “And what’s the book?”
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