“No, I don’t think so—­not quite that.  Even at that age Cogan could not fall in love with curves and color alone.  At any rate, he put out to sea; and the beauty of the little Peruvian girl was with him in many a night-watch.  Under the stars he could shut his eyes and see her—­the flashing teeth as she grimaced up at the horrified nurse, and the eyes still rioting after the curved lips were closed.  And yet it was not her beauty.  A hundred rosy-marbled nymphs could have paraded the beach in a thousand silvery dawns and, once out of sight, his heart never quicken whatever it was—­the innocence, the breathing innocence of her, it may have been that.  And yet there was something more.  There must have been.  He gave it up, but he knew that if he had been born a girl he, too, would want to paddle in the sea at dawn.”

“A sort of poet?” suggested the passenger.

Kieran shot a side glance at the passenger.  “H-m-m—­a good thing he didn’t know it if he was.  He was irresponsible enough without having that excuse.  If he thought then that it was poetry in him which kept him hopping about the world, he’d have been no good at all.  He did enough dreaming as it was.  It was probably only the discipline of a warship, of having to do a daily stint, that kept him from loafing all his time away, for, as maybe I’ve said, a power used to take hold of him at times and swing him.  An idea would come to him and he’d follow it like a guide to heaven.

“He wondered what had become of her, and one day, being now free of the navy, he took a bald-headed schooner out of Portland, Oregon, with a load of lumber for Callao.  Between watches he studied a Spanish-Without-A-Master for one dollar.  The lumber schooner never reached Callao, but she did make one of those volcanic islands to the south side of the harbor—­piled up there and began to fill, which forced the crew to leave in a hurry and row into Callao harbor in their quarter-boat.  From Callao the crew took a trolley to Lima to see the American consul.  In Lima they became scattered, and Cogan and an old fellow named Tommie Jones found themselves together.  Cogan had met Tommie in a restaurant in Portland at about the time Tommie was taking notice of a tall, well-nourished, red-headed lass waiting on table there.  Tommie was a hearty lad of fifty-four or so, and Cogan had helped the little romance along, and because of his interest in the case was how Cogan and Tommie came to ship together.  Well, here was Tommie adrift in Lima after five weeks to sea, and in all that time he hadn’t had a drink, and he wanted one now.  He had no money, but Cogan had a half-dollar, and American silver is good money in Peru; so Cogan bought Tommie three drinks of some kind of Spanish wine and himself one lemonade for the half-dollar.

“It couldn’t have been the wine—­he hadn’t had enough of that.  Maybe it was the reaction from the excitement of the wreck that made Tommie sleepy.  He wanted to turn in, and it being now night-time they went into a park where a fine band was playing.  It was a beautiful night, with a moon; and under the moon, while the music rolled out, dark-eyed senoritas with their mothers strolled up and down, and the young fellows hung around and got in a word when they could.  On the edges the police kept an eye on the loafers.