"You passed me as if you didn't know me," said the other, laughing. "And I'm Captain Cardon no more; plain Jack Cardon, gold prospector, and down on his luck--that's me. Where the deuce have you sprung from?"
"You don't look particularly down on your luck," said Floyd. "Me? I've sprung from the islands--let's go somewhere and have a talk."
"You come with me," said Cardon, turning and leading the way down Fore Street. "Well, this is a bit of good fortune. I was crazy for the sight of some man I knew other than the bar bummers round here. It's four years since we met, isn't it? And I owe you that five dollars still; lost your postal address, or did you give me one?"
He had sailed under Cardon in one of the blackbird freighters, and knew him for what he was--one of the best, most desperate, and irresponsible of men. He had parted from him at 'Frisco in a bar in a haze of tobacco smoke, Cardon, relieved of his responsibilities in life by reason of a quarrel with his owners, sitting on a high stool by the counter, a full glass beside him, and leading the chorus of "A Hot Time in the Old Town To-night."
He was to have seen Cardon the next day, but they had failed to meet, and then the sea had separated them. He remembered the five dollars; they fluttered up to his mind now--ghosts of silver coins forgotten beneath the waters of memory.
Cardon was like a sea breeze to him in his present state of mind, and he followed as Cardon led the way through a garden where seats and tables were set out and into a bar where more seats and tables faced a bar counter gorgeous with colored bottles.
There were island spears and head-dresses on the walls, and photographs of towns sea-washed and backed by coconut palms.
The poetry of the islands spreads across the Pacific even to the bars of Sydney and San Francisco, where the trade winds blow in mariners bronzed by the sun and salt, where even the traders carry with them in their hands something more than copra or gold.
The place was almost empty at this hour, and Cardon, at Floyd's request, called for soft drinks. Floyd produced cigars.
"Well," said Cardon, when he had lit up, "I'm blessed if this doesn't lay over everything. To think of you and me parting at Black Jack's on the Barbary Coast four years and more ago and promising to meet the next day, and then meeting here, just as though we'd only parted yesterday--what have you been doing with yourself?"