For on board Arctic ships faithful servants are allowed quite a deal of freedom, which, by the way, I have never known them abuse.
“Well, my friends,” said Ingomar, “you must excuse my shortcomings as a story-teller. I suppose I’m not old enough to tell fibs, so my yarn, if short and stupid, has at least truthfulness in its favour.”
“Heave round, sir,” said Captain Mayne Brace.
CHAPTER III
“MY PRIDE WARRED AGAINST MY BETTER FEELINGS”
“Well, gentlemen, Ingomar being merely my stage name because I played in that piece more than in any other, I ought at the very offset to tell you my baptismal one. That was Hans, and my father being an Armstrong, I very naturally adopted his surname. Hans Armstrong, then; and here you have me clad in skins, of which rig-out I am beginning to be slightly ashamed.”
“Pardon me,” said Captain Brace, “you tell us that you belonged to Chicago. Do you happen to have any personal acquaintance with the Dutch-American millionaire Armstrong?”
“I have known that gentleman, sir, since I was eighteen inches long. He wasn’t much of a millionaire then. I do myself the honour of believing that it was I who brought all the good luck to that well-known family; and although when I was a child Mrs. A. occasionally showed her extreme affection by spanking me, I loved and love her very much. If alive, young gentlemen, she is my mother; if dead, she is a saint in heaven. They have just one other child, a girl, my dear sister Marie, years younger than myself, and she will fall heir some day, I suppose, to all my father’s millions.”
“But you yourself, Hans?”
“Well, sir, I—I suppose I am a fool, sir, or, more probably, a born idiot. I am likewise the prodigal son. For the last six months and over I have not certainly been eating husks with the swine. It would be wrong and cowardly in me to allude to my friends the Yak-Yaks as swine; but I have been living, as I have already told you, in a somewhat unrefined way.