"If you're afraid it's my last--" suggested Cadogan.
"That saves me, for it _is_ my last." With the word Cadogan threw the empty cigar-case on the table.
Meade picked up the case, a gun-metal one, with Cadogan's monogram in thin, flat silver letters on the side. "You throw that down, Cadogan, as if you wanted to give it away."
"Did it look that way?" Cadogan took it from Meade's extended hand. "I've carried that a good many years." He stood up as he finished speaking, to reach for some matches from the next table. After lighting up he remained standing.
"Clear, settled weather, and a smooth sea." He was gazing reflectively through the weather air-port as he spoke.
"Cadogan"--Meade was speaking--"give us some more of your adventures."
Cadogan drew out his watch, also of gun-metal. "And I've carried that a good many years, too." He spoke as if to himself. He looked at the face. "No, it's too late, Mr. Meade. It's too late to begin now."
"It's never too late. Just think, in your short life you have lived more volumes than I have written. You know more, ten times more, about real life than I do, and I'm sixty. I wonder"--he fanned the smoke from him--"would you mind dying after all you've been through?"
Cadogan was still standing. He set his left foot on the seat of his chair, his left elbow on his knee, and his chin in the heel of his left hand. By extending two long, supple left fingers he could hold his cigar while he blew rings of smoke toward the air-port. He blew them now--once, twice, three times. "I don't know any healthy men who are eager to die, do you?" he said, half smiling, presently.
"Just that. And yet, if I had to go, any time now, I don't see where I could have any kick coming. Somewhere, sometime, it had to come. And yet I was wondering, only to-night, queerly enough--" Between the first two fingers and thumb of his right hand he was somersaulting the gun-metal cigar-case against the table-top. _Tap_--_tap_--_tap_--one end, then the other--_tap_--_tap_--_tap_--it went.
While Cadogan paused Meade was making mental notes of him. How wide and powerful the shoulders loomed, how trim the waist, the grace of the long white fingers, the smooth curves of the strong face, all brown below the eyes and all white above! "What a fight you could put up!" thought Meade. "And what a pity if anything should happen to you before you should have had your chance!"