and his eyes burned and danced; they seemed to look right into me,
horribly gleaming, till the whole man became, as it were, just two
bright spots of eyes--one saw nothing else.

"Ah," he said, after a long, cruel glare at me, "this is the first
time Jim and I ever met. The first time. We shall be great friends, we
shall. We shall be better acquainted, you and I. I wouldn't wonder if
I didn't make a man of you, one time or another. Give me your hand,
Jim."

I gave him my hand; he looked at it under the lantern; he traced one
or two of the lines with his blackened finger-nails, muttering some
words in a strange language, which somehow made my flesh creep. He
repeated the words: "Orel. Orel. Adartha Cay." Then he glanced at the
other hand, still muttering, and made a sort of mark with his fingers
on my forehead. Hugh told me afterwards that he seemed to trace a kind
of zigzag on my left temple. All the time he was muttering he seemed
to be half-conscious, almost in a trance, or as if he were mad: he
frightened us dreadfully. After he had made the mark upon my brow he
came to himself again.

"They will see it," he muttered. "It'll be bright enough. The
mark. It'll shine. They'll know when they see it. It is very good. A
very good sign: it burns in the dark. They'll know it over there in
the night." Then he went on mumbling to himself, but so brokenly that
we could catch only a few words here and there--"black and red,
knowledge and beauty; red and black, pleasure and strength. What do
the cards say?"

He opened his thick sea-coat, and took out a little packet of cards