I hope to goodness the poor old chap's got some encouragement to-day, if nothing else, for he's fearfully down on his luck, and no mistake, thinks Dick Penryn about his friend, Murray Frobisher. And, between me and those fire-irons there, I'm getting almost afraid to let him out of my sight, for fear he'll go and do something foolish

But foolish endeavors seem the order of the day for Frobisher, a cashiered Royal Navy ex-officer.

Frobisher inveigles himself into dozens of ambitious schemes to win fortune -- half of them done in hopes of restoring himself to good standing in his home country. Yet the wrong sorts of opportunities seem to come knocking -- from running arms to Korean rebels, to commanding of a battleship beneath a Chinese flag