’But it so happened that I had a man in the hospital at the time, and going there to see about him the day before the opening of the Inquiry, I saw in the white men’s ward that little chap tossing on his back, with his arm in splints, and quite light-headed.  To my great surprise the other one, the long individual with drooping white moustache, had also found his way there.  I remembered I had seen him slinking away during the quarrel, in a half prance, half shuffle, and trying very hard not to look scared.  He was no stranger to the port, it seems, and in his distress was able to make tracks straight for Mariani’s billiard-room and grog-shop near the bazaar.  That unspeakable vagabond, Mariani, who had known the man and had ministered to his vices in one or two other places, kissed the ground, in a manner of speaking, before him, and shut him up with a supply of bottles in an upstairs room of his infamous hovel.  It appears he was under some hazy apprehension as to his personal safety, and wished to be concealed.  However, Mariani told me a long time after (when he came on board one day to dun my steward for the price of some cigars) that he would have done more for him without asking any questions, from gratitude for some unholy favour received very many years ago—­as far as I could make out.  He thumped twice his brawny chest, rolled enormous black-and-white eyes glistening with tears:  “Antonio never forget—­Antonio never forget!” What was the precise nature of the immoral obligation I never learned, but be it what it may, he had every facility given him to remain under lock and key, with a chair, a table, a mattress in a corner, and a litter of fallen plaster on the floor, in an irrational state of funk, and keeping up his pecker with such tonics as Mariani dispensed.  This lasted till the evening of the third day, when, after letting out a few horrible screams, he found himself compelled to seek safety in flight from a legion of centipedes.  He burst the door open, made one leap for dear life down the crazy little stairway, landed bodily on Mariani’s stomach, picked himself up, and bolted like a rabbit into the streets.  The police plucked him off a garbage-heap in the early morning.  At first he had a notion they were carrying him off to be hanged, and fought for liberty like a hero, but when I sat down by his bed he had been very quiet for two days.  His lean bronzed head, with white moustaches, looked fine and calm on the pillow, like the head of a war-worn soldier with a child-like soul, had it not been for a hint of spectral alarm that lurked in the blank glitter of his glance, resembling a nondescript form of a terror crouching silently behind a pane of glass.  He was so extremely calm, that I began to indulge in the eccentric hope of hearing something explanatory of the famous affair from his point of view.  Why I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence which, after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an obscure