Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/275

 VIII.

BEAUTY IN CAMP.

were walking slowly up and down the promenade deck of a Union liner—I and a grizzled, world-worn "knock-about," who was returning from the Diamond Fields with a very comfortable balance awaiting him at one of the London banks—and, as is not by any means infrequent among male wanderers on shipboard, our conversation had turned on the Superior Sex and its devious ways in relation to our own.

"Ah, women!" said my companion, blowing with pregnant emphasis a long blue stream of cigar smoke from his pursed-up lips; "they are, as you say, the most com- 256