“But what was the disease?” asked the Pilot.
“Some sort of special Chinese fever; something bred o’ dirt and filth and foulness; a complaint you have to live amongst for weeks, before you’ll get it; a kind o’ beri-beri or break-bone, which was new to the doctors here. I’ve been disinfected and fumigated till I couldn’t hardly breathe. Races has their special diseases, just the same as they has their special foods: this war’n’t an English sickness; all its characteristics were Chinee, and it killed the Captain because he’d lived that long with Chinamen that, I firmly believe, his pigtail had begun to shoot. Furrin crews, furrin crews! Give me the British sailor, an’ I’ll sail my ship anywhere.”
“And run her on the rocks, at the end of the voyage,” growled the Pilot.
“I never came ashore to argify,” retorted the Captain. “But if it comes to a matter of navigation, there are points I could give any man, even pilots.”
Seeing that the bone of contention was about to be gnawed by the sea-dogs, Rose interposed with a question.
“Have you just come ashore, Captain?”
“In a manner o’ speakin’ he has,” answered her father, who took the words out of his friend’s mouth, “and in a manner o’ speakin’ he hasn’t. You see, my dear, we went for a little preliminary cruise.”
“The first thing your father told me was about this here robbery of mails. ‘When was that?’ I asked. ‘On the night of the 8th or early morning of the 9th,’ he says. That was when the captain of the barque died. I remembered it well. ‘Summerhayes,’ I said, ‘I have a notion.’ And this is the result, my dear.”
From the capacious pocket of his thick pilot-jacket he pulled a brown and charred piece of canvas.
“What’s that?” he asked.