all the seven sins. Doubtless the girl had gone shares with the Levantine craftsman who had done the work—an eagle, in bold red and blue, surmounted by a lopsided crown, and surrounded by a wavy design. The eagle was in profile, and its single eye had a disconcerting trick of winking sardonically whenever Farragut Hutchison moved his back muscles or twitched his shoulder blades.
Always, in his memory, Stuart McGregor saw that tattoo mark.
Always did he see the wicked, leering squint in the eagle's eye—and then he would scream, wherever he happened to be—in a theater, a Broadway restaurant, or across some good friend's mahogany and beef.
Thinking back, he remembered that, for all their bravado, for all their showing off to each other, both he and Farragut Hutchinson had been afraid since that day up the hinterland when, drunk with fermented palm-wine, they had insulted the fetish of the Bakotos, while the men were away hunting and none left to guard the village except the women and children and a few feeble old men whose curses and high-pitched maledictions were picturesque, but hardly effectual enough to stop him and his partner
