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 "He'd like to see you. Should you care to have lunch with him and me in town to-morrow?"

"Have you told him you've talked to me?"

"Oh yes—told him before I did it. He knows your writings—read all you've written, apparently. He'd heard about you too from a chap on the Naldera. That's the boat you came by, isn't it?"

"Yes,' said Somers.

"Yes," echoed Jack. "He was all over me when I mentioned your name. You'd like Kangaroo. He's a great chap."

"What's his name?"

"Cooley—Ben—Benjamin Cooley."

"They like him on the Bulletin, don't they? Didn't I see something about Ben Cooley and his straight talk?"

"Yes. Oh, he can talk straight enough—and crooked enough as well, if it comes to that. You'll come to lunch then? We lunch in his chambers."

Somers agreed. Jack was silent, as if he had not much more to say. After a while he added reflectively:

"Yes, I'm glad to have brought you and Kangaroo together."

"Why do they call him Kangaroo?"

"Looks like one."

Again there was a silence, each man thinking his own thoughts.

"You and Kangaroo will catch on like wax, as far as ideas go," Jack prognosticated. "But he's an unfeeling beggar, really. And that's where you won't cotton on to him. That's where I come in."

He looked at Somers with a faint smile.

"Come in to what?" laughed Somers.

Jack took his pipe from his mouth with a little flourish.

"In a job like this," he said, " a man wants a mate—yes, a mate—that he can say anything to, and be absolutely himself with. Must have it. And as far as I go—for me—you don't mind if I say it, do you?—Kangaroo could never have a mate. He's as odd as any phnix bird I've ever heard tell of. You couldn't mate him to anything in the heavens above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. No, there's no female