A dumpy, fat little steamer rolled itself along like a sailor on shore from Gibraltar to Tangier, and Holcombe, leaning over the rail of its quarter-deck, smiled down at the chattering group of Arabs and Moors stretched on their rugs beneath him.  A half-naked negro, pulling at the dates in the basket between his bare legs, held up a handful to him with a laugh, and Holcombe laughed back and emptied the cigarettes in his case on top of him, and laughed again as the ship’s crew and the deck passengers scrambled over one another and shook out their voluminous robes in search of them.  He felt at ease with the world and with himself, and turned his eyes to the white walls of Tangier with a pleasure so complete that it shut out even the thought that it was a pleasure.

The town seemed one continuous mass of white stucco, with each flat, low-lying roof so close to the other that the narrow streets left no trace.  To the left of it the yellow coastline and the green olive-trees and palms stretched up against the sky, and beneath him scores of shrieking blacks fought in their boats for a place beside the steamer’s companion-way.  He jumped into one of these open wherries and fell sprawling among his baggage, and laughed lightly as a boy as the boatman set him on his feet again, and then threw them from under him with a quick stroke of the oars.  The high, narrow pier was crowded with excited customs officers in ragged uniforms and dirty turbans, and with a few foreign residents looking for arriving passengers.  Holcombe had his feet on the upper steps of the ladder, and was ascending slowly.  There was a fat, heavily built man in blue serge leaning across the railing of the pier.  He was looking down, and as his eyes met Holcombe’s face his own straightened into lines of amazement and most evident terror.  Holcombe stopped at the sight, and stared back wondering.  And then the lapping waters beneath him and the white town at his side faded away, and he was back in the hot, crowded court-room with this man’s face before him.  Meakim, the fourth of the Police Commissioners, confronted him, and saw in his presence nothing but a menace to himself.

Holcombe came up the last steps of the stairs, and stopped at their top.  His instinct and life’s tradition made him despise the man, and to this was added the selfish disgust that his holiday should have been so soon robbed of its character by this reminder of all that he had been told to put behind him.

Meakim swept off his hat as though it were hurting him, and showed the great drops of sweat on his forehead.

“For God’s sake!” the man panted, “you can’t touch me here, Mr. Holcombe.  I’m safe here; they told me I’d be.  You can’t take me.  You can’t touch me.”

Holcombe stared at the man coldly, and with a touch of pity and contempt.  “That is quite right, Mr. Meakim,” he said.  “The law cannot reach you here.”

“Then what do you want with me?” the man demanded, forgetful in his terror of anything but his own safety.