“You’ll have about the same luck Dad did when he asked him his business,” retorted Shirley, “and that wasn’t much.”
“Take my advice, all of you, and let him alone,” remarked Colonel Ashton.
“That is good advice, Ashton,” declared Mr. Willing. “But come, it’s bedtime and we shall want to be about early in the morning to enjoy some of this ocean breeze.”
An hour later all were asleep.
Had they been about they would have seen a strange sight.
On the upper deck aft, as the ship’s bell chimed midnight, three men sat in deep conversation. Two of them were strangers, but the third Shirley or any of her party would immediately have recognized as Henry Bristow.
And there would also have been something else noticeable. The bandage had been removed from his head, nor was there wound nor swelling to show why it should have been tied up in the first place.
The three men talked for perhaps fifteen minutes in low whispers and then parted, going their several ways.
As he had promised, Bristow was about the ship the following morning, but his head was once more bandaged. Mabel, true to her words of the night before, seized the first opportunity and asked him how he had been injured.
“That,” was the quiet reply, “I cannot say.”