The boys reached the tent with his breakfast, and one of them dragged a chair from inside the tent for me.  I sat down on it without waiting for the professor to invite me.

“I’m tired,” I said, untruthfully, minded to refuse an invitation to eat, but interested to see whether he would invite me or not.

“Have you any friends at the hotel?” he asked, looking up at me darkly under the bushiest eyebrows I ever saw.

“I’ve got friends wherever I go,” I answered.  “I make friends.”

“Are you going far?” he demanded, holding out a foot for his boy to pull a stocking on.

“That depends,” I said.

“On what?”

“On whether I get employment.”

I said that at random, without pausing to think what impression I might create.  He pulled the night-shirt off over his head, throwing the helmet to the ground, and sat like a great hairy gorilla for the boy to hang day-clothes on him.  He had the hairiest breast and arms I ever saw, hung with lumpy muscles that heightened his resemblance to an ape.

“I might give you work,” he said presently, beginning to eat before the boy had finished dressing him.

“I want to travel” I said.  “If I could find a job that would take me up and down the length and breadth of this land, that would suit me finely.”

“That is the kind of a man I want,” he said, eying me keenly.  “I have a German, but I need an Englishman.  Do you speak native languages?”

“Scarcely a word.”

To my surprise he nodded approval at that answer.

“I have parties of natives traveling all over the country gathering folk lore, and ethnographical particulars, but they get into a village and sit down for whole weeks at a time, drawing pay for doing nothing.  I need an Englishman to go with them and keep them moving.”

“All well and good,” I said, “but I understand the government is not in favor of white men traveling about at random.”

“But I am known to the government,” he answered.  “I have been accorded facilities because of my professional standing.  Have you references you can give me?”

“No,” I said.  “No references.”

I thought that would stump him, but on the contrary he looked rather pleased.

“That is good.  References are too frequently evidence of back-stairs influence.”

All this while he kept eying me between mouthfuls.  Whenever I seemed to look away his eyes fairly burned holes in me.  Whenever food got in his beard (which was frequently) be used the napkin more as a shield behind which to take stock of me than as a means of getting clean again.  By the time his breakfast was finished his beard was a beastly mess, but he probably had my features from every angle fixed indelibly in his memory.  The sensation was that I had been analyzed and card indexed.

“I pay good wages,” he remarked, and then stuck his face, beard and all, into the basin of warm water his boy had brought.  “Where did you get that rifle?” he demanded, spluttering, and combing the beard out with his fingers.