"First, let me ring for a bottle of that old brandy of yours."
The brandy was got. Wylie induced him to drink a wine-glassful neat, and then to sit at the table and examine the sailors' declaration and the logs. "I'm no great scholard," said he. "I warn't a going to lay these before the underwriters till you had overhauled them. There, take another drop now—'twill do you good—while I draw up this thundering blind."
Thus encouraged and urged, the broken-hearted schemer languidly compared the seamen's declaration with the logs; and, even in his feeble state of mind and body, made an awkward discovery at once.
"Why, they don't correspond!" said he.
"What don't correspond?"
"Your men's statement and the ship's log. The men speak of one heavy gale after another, in January, and the pumps going; but the log says, 'A puff of wind from the N.E.' And, here again, the entry exposes your exaggeration. One branch of our evidence contradicts the other; this comes of trying to prove too much. You must say the log was lost, went down with the ship."
"How can I?" cried Wylie. "I have told too many I had got it safe at home."
"Why did you say that? What madness!"
"Why were you away from your office at such a time? How can I know everything and do everything? I counted on you for the head-work ashore. Can't ye think of any way to square the log to that part of our tale? might paste in a leaf or two, eh?"
"That would be discovered at once. You have committed an irremediable error. What broad strokes this Hudson makes. He must have written with the stump of a quill."