Rose, who was sitting near the window, made a step or two towards the passage, but the old Pilot, who from where he stood could see through the glass of the front door, forestalled her, and she seated herself opposite the skipper and his clues.
“So you think of visiting the police sergeant?” she asked, by way of keeping up the conversation.
But the skipper’s whole attention was fixed on the voices in the next room, into which the Pilot had conducted his visitor.
“H’m,” said Sartoris, “I had an idea I knew the voice, but I must have been mistaken. Who is the party, Miss Rose?”
“I haven’t the slightest clue,” replied the girl, smiling. “Father has such a number of strange friends in the port that I’ve long given up trying to keep count of them. They come at all hours, about all sorts of things.”
The words were hardly out of her mouth, when the Pilot, wearing a most serious expression of face, entered the room.
“Well, well,” he said, “well, well. Who’d ha’ thought it? Dear, dear. Of all the extraordinary things! Now, Cap’n Sartoris, if you’d ’a’ asked me, I’d ’a’ said the thing was impossible, impossible. Such things goes in streaks, and his, to all intents and purposes, was a bad ’n; and then it turns out like this. It’s most remarkable, most extraordinary. It’s beyond me. I don’t fathom it.”
“What the deuce an’ all are you talkin’ about, Summerhayes?” Sartoris spoke most deprecatingly. “A man would think you’d buried a shipmate, or even lost your ship.”
“Eh? What?” the Pilot thundered. “Lost my ship? No, no. I’ve bin wrecked in a fruiter off the coast of Sardinia, an’ I’ve bin cast away on the island of Curacoa, but it was always in another man’s vessel. No, sir, I never failed to bring the owners’ property safe into port. Any fool can run his ship on shore, and litter her cargo along half-a-mile of sea coast.”
“We’ve heard that argyment before,” said Sartoris. “We quite understand—you couldn’t do such a thing if you tried. You’re a most exceptional person, and I’m proud to know you; but what’s this dreadful thing that’s redooced you to such a state of bad temper, that your best friends ’d hardly know you? I ask you that, Summerhayes. Is it anything to do with these clues that’s on the table?”