Achmed Abdullah

“ Then he looked away from them and toward the other occupants of the room whom he had decided to observe.
Not far from the black settle by the bar a party of three were sitting around one of the oaken tables, framed on either side by other groups, prosy, uninteresting, small tradesmen or mechanics, as Ogilvie had decided. But these three men were of a different stamp. They sat very quietly, very silently. There was something inhuman about their quietude. One seemed like an elderly roué, handsome in a way, yet amorphous, washed over by the pitiless hand of time and vice. ”

“ In the center of the room, paying not the slightest attention to the click of the counters at the next table, where some men were playing checkers, a man sat alone, a little hunchback whose pear-shaped head just protruded above the table rim. His face was distinguished by an immense hooked nose, a grave brow curving over a tragic, portentous gaze—the look of a mad prophet—and his dome was surmounted incongruously, ludicrously, by a cap in a check of violent magenta and pea green, set far back on the perspiring head. There was something about him that reminded Ogilvie of the Old Testament ”

“ Ogilvie held out his hand. “All right,” he said, “let's have the check!”
“But”—the girl shook her head and glanced over at the man with the red beard as if appealing to him—“you have the check, sir!”
“I have not, my dear!”
The girl seemed flustered.
“S'bog s'bogpie,” she exclaimed, calling on some Slav deity for help; “you have, you have——”
Blaine Ogilvie laughed. He had always been an easy-going man, had always disliked arguments and quarrels.
“All right, all right,” he replied, “have it your own way. Anyhow, that coat is valuable, and I want it back, check or no check. ”