Limekiller!

Her companion said, “You see, my dear Mr. John, you have already been as it were branded with your lovely lady’s brand;” and he laughed. And then he said, ‘Join us, do, sir.” He, evidently, was taking no occasion for either offense or defense from John’s simple — and it had been meant as no more than that — greeting. Neither was he, immediately, identifiable in what, after the glare of even the middle-late-afternoon sun, seemed to be what others have described as an Impenetrable Gloom. And as to why this should be so, when the comely young woman should at once have been obvious as a comely young woman, well, let us suppose that she had been sitting in a better light.

So Limekiller, having already resisted the temptation to pull his shirt high enough, and his trousers low enough, to disclose an absolutely unbranded hip. had had sense enough to resist a gesture which would have provoked only male laughter and female Oh Go Awav Closer screams in the Pelican Bar, where such disclosures were, if not common, at least not terribly uncommon: particularly on the part of members of the Right Royal Regiment: Limekiller said, “Thank you; I will, if I may.”

The bar was small, clean, and quiet; he had been there once before; why had he not come again? Before trying to think why, he turned to the barkeep, who had himself turned into a waiter and was even now waiting for the order, and declared for “A chaparita of —” he hesitated naming his poison and it was now named for him. (“Of Governor Morgan,” said the new-found host, specifying the by-far-the-best local rum.) “Thank you, sir,” saidjack. “- and an entire lime,” saidjack, “plus the tallest glass in the house, and all the ice not needed to keep the snapper fresh.” This harmless play, with its implication that The Spyglass was a fishing-boat without a “wet-well,” was received with good humor on the part of the waiter, the young woman whose Christian name certainly ended in — ita, her companion, coming more and more clearly into focus by the moment: and even from the shadow corner was now heard a chuckle with which Limekiller felt familiar: one thing at a time, however.

Just then, thank God, and not before time, either, the penny dropped. He pretended it had already done so. “Well, Superintendent,” he said, (he hoped) smoothly. “Nice to be in your company in some capacity other than that of a malefactor — not that that wasn’t as nice as it could possibly have been, I hasten to add.”

Clement Edward Alfred Cumberbatch, one of H.M.’s Superintendents of Police, waved his long brown hand. “A mere detail, Mr. Limekiller. Only a formality. Dismiss it from your mind forever. - Besides: I am off duty now.”

Limekiller was swiftly recruiting his health from the tallest, iciest, lime-iest, rum-iest glass in the house when a voice from the shadow corner said, “I am off duty now, too. But then, as you all know, I am always off duty.”

Miss — ita greeted this with a sound something like, “Tchuh!”, a sound much used by the women of British Hidalgo; but the Superintendent swept it and its implications away. “On the contrary. Professor, in my opinion you are always on duty, because you are always adding to our stock of knowledge.”

“Professor!” Limekiller exclaimed. “How did you get here so soon? I swear I never saw you by the Swing Bridge —” Instantly he said this, something insistently desired to remind him that he had seen someone else by the Swing Bridge, even less expectedly; but no time was allowed for reflection, introspection, or, possibly even —

“Never use the Bridge,” the Professor said; this was not an advice to others, it was a statement of personal preference. “I left right after you did, but I went down Shipwright Lane and hailed the ferry.”

“The, uh, ferry?”

Limekiller had not known there was a ferry, either by way of Shipwright Lane or anywhere else in King Town; in the Out- Districts: yes: a few several of them, some larger than others but all of them winched across the rivers by very hard labor; and all highly visible. “What ferry?”