Nodding, eyes glittering with enthusiastic hatred, “Bastard we have been trying to assassinate for two years now. Nearly got him in Yokohama with nice, right-angled fragment, so close he was actually standing inside angle, but missed him by millimeters—polny pizdets! such luck, that man!”

Domenico Sfinciuno, whose family in 1297, along with quite a few others among the Venetian rich and powerful of the day, had been disqualified from ever sitting on the Great Council—and hence made ineligible for the Dogedom of Venice—by then-sitting Doge Pietro Gradenigo, in his infamous decree known as the Serrata del Maggior Consiglio. But not even Napoleon’s abolition of the office of Doge five hundred years later had any effect on the claim to what, by now, generations of Sfinciuni, in a curious inertia of resentment, had come to regard as theirs by right. Meanwhile they devoted themselves to trade with the East. In the wake of the Polos’ return to Venice, the

Tastefully ornamented in silver with the Chums of Chance heraldry and the motto SANGUIS RUBER, MENS PURA, the set had been that very day presented to the boys by current Shadow-Doge-in-Exile

In town an ambience of limitless iniquity reigned, a stifling warmth day and night, not an hour passing without someone discharging a firearm at someone else, or a public sexual act, often in a horse-trough among more than two parties, along with random horsewhippings, buffaloings, robberies at gunpoint, poker pots raked in without the hand being shown, pissing not only against walls but also upon passersby, sand in the sugar bowls, turpentine and sulfuric acid in the whiskey, brothels dedicated to a wide range of preferences, including arnophilia, or an unaccustomed interest in sheep, some of the ovine nymphs in these establishments being quite appealing indeed, even to folks who might not wholeheartedly share the taste, with fleeces dyed in a variety of fashionable colors, including the perennial favorites aquamarine and mauve, or wearing items of feminine—not to mention masculine—attire (hats for some reason, being popular) meant to enhance the animal’s sexual appeal—“though some of the flock,” as the Rev confessed, “given the level of duplicity prevailing here, do turn out to be mutton dressed as lamb or, on occasion, goat, for even these are regularly sought out by a small but reliable fraction of the pilgrims who daily make their way across the desert to this Lourdes of the licentious. . . . But let us not dwell further on such patently abominable behavior. Time for my rounds, come on along,” invited the Rev, “and I’ll show you the sights. Ah, here’s the Scalped Indian Saloon. Shall we irrigate?” It was the first of

means of a written note inside a tennis-ball lowered on a length of line. It will be recalled that this method of passing information had been adopted by the crew during their brief though inconclusive sojourn “south of the border,” where they had observed it among the low elements who dissipate their lives in placing wagers on the outcomes of pelota games. (For readers here making their first acquaintance with our band of young adventurers, it must be emphasized at once that—perhaps excepting the as yet insufficiently known Chick Counterfly—none would e’er have entered the morally poisonous atmosphere of the “frontón,” as such haunts are called

Robinson’s type, accurate wind measurements, as an index of how rapidly the ship was proceeding, conveying these down to the bridge by

Miles, with his marginal gifts of coördination, and Chick, with a want of alacrity fully as perceptible, took their stations at the control-panels of the apparatus, as Darby Suckling, meantime, went scrambling up the ratlines and shrouds of the giant ellipsoidal envelope from which the gondola depended, to the very top, where the aery flux was uninterrupted, in order to read, from an anemometer of the