"Can't tell wot the blighter might look like behind those bloomin'
brown glasses."
"But he's not bothersome to any one," suggested a second speaker,
in a slightly foreign accent. "He regards his own affairs."
"Right you are, bo!" approved a tall, deeply browned man of
thirty, all sinewy angles, who, from the shoulders up, suggested
nothing so much as a club with a gnarled knob on the end of it, a
tough, reliable, hardwood club, capable of dealing a stiff blow in
an honest cause. "If he deals in conversation, he must SELL it. I
don't notice him giving any of it away."
"He gave some to Kast the last time he dined here," observed a
languid and rather elegant elderly man, who occupied the fourth
side of the table. "Mine host didn't like it."
"I should suppose Senior Kast would be hardened," remarked the
young Caracunan who had defended the absent.
"Our eyeglassed friend scored for once, though. They had just
served him the usual table-d'hote salad--you know, two leaves of
lettuce with a caterpillar on one. Kast happened to be passing.
Our friend beckoned him over. 'A little less of the fauna and more
of the flora, Senior Kast,' said he in that gritty, scientific
voice of his.
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