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IT IS a weird tale of love, mystery and sudden death which was told in the Red Lantern Cafe, hard by the waterfront, at the foot of our street, where red-blooded men from the four quarters of the earth come up from the sea in search of wine, woman and song, to bathe in the glare of the white lights and throw their money to the dogs.
Mathew Laucks, second in the black gang, aboard the steamer Catawac, just in with a cargo of tinsel and toys from China, his hairy breast exposed to the gaze of other patrons of the place, arms akimbo on a sloppy table, listened to the loose tongues of his companions wagging over a weighty subject.
"Aye, I'm tellin' you, when a man's dead, he's dead!" shouted one of the sailormen whose head was crowned with a skull-cap fashioned from the end of a stocking—a striped stocking, red and yellow, picked up in some far-away port.
Patrons of the Red Lantern, seated about other tables, heard, turned their heads, and some moved nearer that they might hear better.
"Oh, ho, he is, is he? Then, how about th' skipper o' th' Silver Bell? Didn't I see him, with my own two eyes, near a month after a lascar had knocked him from the bridge with a marline spike!" roared Chips, pounding the table with a heavy fist.
"A man's body goes back to the dust from which it came," spoke up a man who stood behind the skull-capped sailor's chair. This was the sky pilot from the Mission House around the corner. He wore a long, black robe and continually fingered a huge cross that dangled from a chain about his neck. His business on the waterfront was to intercept the souls that drifted in on the harbor of missing men.
"But," he continued, his candid eyes centering steadily on the hairy breast of Matt Laucks, "the real man, the unseen soul, never dies—"
"Bah!" broke in a big, broad-shouldered seaman who had looked often down the neck of a bottle since coming to the Red Lantern. "Souls? Men have no souls! I know, I do, for I have not always been mate in the Catawac. Once, it has been so long, long ago, I was master of surgery. My great ambition was to find that thing men call their souls. I have opened the breast of a living, breathing, human being and found him ninety per cent belly.
"It is true, I found a wonderful engine inside of man. But, for that matter, there is also a wonderful engine inside the Catawac. Feed either one of them fuel and they'll move. Neglect the fires and either one will stop. Bah! Man has no soul! He's mostly belly! And that settles that."
"It does, eh?" blurted Mathew Laucks. "Perhaps you overlooked something—While you were about it, did you see anything of his con-
