Rising hastily, the thwarted deacon managed a familiar but far from warming smile. “This is—er—Captain Vanton?” he asked, in a suave tone very few persons in Blue Port had ever heard.
The visitor did not say whether it was or was not. He looked around, as he might have on coming on deck, to see whether the mate was doing his work properly. Richard Hand lugged a chair forward, but Captain Vanton gave no sign that he noticed this. He spoke a few words in his best quarterdeck voice:
“When did you last hear from Captain King?”
The effect on Richard Hand was curious. For a moment his weak and vicious jaw dropped. A look of immense distrust invaded his crafty eyes. Then he seemed to recover himself. Rubbing his hands, as if they were cold, as they doubtless were, Mr. Hand eyed his questioner up and down a moment and then gave question for question:
“Have you a letter from him?”
Captain Vanton, who had not hitherto looked at the village miser at all, now turned and gazed squarely at him, and with so cold and glittering and truculent an eye that Mr. Hand seemed to become more shrunken than ever.
“No,” Captain Vanton told him. Then he asked, “Have you?”
The village miser shuffled and cleared his throat. He mumbled something, a negative apparently. There was a moment’s silence which was broken by the Captain, whose tone had a chilled steel edge.
“Why don’t you answer my question, sir?”
It was not the polite “sir” of the land but the formal, and often positively insulting, “sir” of the sea. Mr. Hand had never been so set down in his life. There was never much starch in him, and what there was went out completely.