I found him waiting for me before the compartment in which our passenger had been locked. He took his pipe from his mouth and stared at me thoughtfully.

“Levine, you're Jewish, aren't you?”

“Why, yes, sir.”

“Orthodox?”

I said, “No, sir. My mother and dad are, but I—”

“No matter,” he said. “Listen!”

He nodded toward the door. From within came sounds—the voice of our passenger talking to himself in a high, thin, rising-and-falling whine. Syllables emerged from the patter, and made sense. A word here and there, a phrase.

“Why,” I said, “that's Hebrew!”

“That's what I thought,” said the Old Man. “Can you speak it?”

“I can understand it,” I said. “Most of it, anyway. I speak Yiddish better.”

“Good!” grunted the skipper. “Come in here.”

He ushered me before him into the compartment. For the first time I got a real look at our unwilling guest. He was a queer-looking duck. Lean and hot and angry-looking, with great, smoldering eyes that made you want to crawl when he turned them on you. Not with fear or disgust. With something else. I don't know just what it was, A sort of—well, awe, maybe. That's the closest I can come to it. A feeling that if you didn't watch your step, something pretty terrible was going to happen to you.

He had coal-black hair to match his eyes, and wore a straggly beard that accentuated rather than minimized the acid-bitter thinness of his lips. His high cheekbones had a consumptive flush, and his nostrils were pinched.

He looked like someone I'd seen once, somewhere, but I couldn't remember who it was, or where, or when.

His chanting wail stopped abruptly when we entered, and he cringed, frightened but defiant. Like a trapped animal, I thought.

The skipper said, “Speak to him, Jake.”

I said, “Hyah, pal!”

“In Hebrew.”

“Oh!” I said, and took a whack at it. It was heavy going, because I'd forgotten a lot. I said, “Greetings! My name is Levine, Jacob Levine. Can you understand what I am saying?”

Could he! His sultry eyes lighted, and he burst into a torrent of words.

“What is he saying?” asked the skipper.

“Too much,” I complained, “and too fast!” I shook my head at the old guy. “Too fast,” I said in Hebrew. “You must speak more slowly.”

He cut his motors a few hundred thousand r.p.m., and at a more moderate tempo I began to catch his drift. He was, he declared, a humble man, and we were the mighty ones whom he feared. He was too meek and miserable a mortal to be the victim of our wrath. He kissed our feet and begged that he be freed. If we loosed him, he would sing our praise forever.

“Well?” asked the Old Man.