CHAPTER XVII
Sparks and AshesAfter marveling at his good fortune for two minutes, it took Mr. Campion rather less than five to discover that he had dropped into a morass nearly as fatal as the one outside. In youth Mr. Knapp had been something of a liability, and in middle age a deplorable if useful little crook, but neither of these phases had prepared his friend for the lonely old man of the sea he had become. He appeared desperate to talk: marooned amid a generation who treated him as something between an oracle and a pet owl, he seized upon the visitor as if he carried the elixir of life.
At any other moment Campion might well have considered him heaven-sent, for there was very little in the whole Ludor empire of which Mr. Knapp did not possess at least a limited view, and nothing th
