This was power.

Willems loved it.

In another, and perhaps a lower plane, his days did not want for their less complex but more obvious pleasures.

He liked the simple games of skill--billiards; also games not so simple, and calling for quite another kind of skill--poker.

He had been the aptest pupil of a steady-eyed, sententious American, who had drifted mysteriously into Macassar from the wastes of the Pacific, and, after knocking about for a time in the eddies of town life, had drifted out enigmatically into the sunny solitudes of the Indian Ocean.