trip
came to grief. She collided with another vessel in a thick fog in the
Straits of Rhio. Shark-infested waters those are, and the bloodcurdling
tales told me by the three or four survivors I spoke to on the
homeward trip made me shudder.
Back
in Europe, I called upon my Parisian financial backer to get an
accounting from him. Remembering the quality of the stuff I had shipped
to him, I expected to have a nice little sum waiting for me. But the
way he worked it out with a piece of chalk on his boy's school slate, I
not only had nothing to get from him, but was in fact indebted to him
to the tune of some fifteen hundred dollars. From information I
possessed I knew of the big profits he had made on everything I had
shipped to him, but I was completely in his hands. I was sore at heart.
But I paid up.
Then,
as there was nothing more to keep me in Paris, I went to the Gare du
Nord to catch my boat-train. At the station I told a porter to watch my
traps for a while. When I came back both porter and traps had gone.
I
entered the front door of my London home actually poorer than when,
eighteen months before, I had set out in quest of a fortune.
