It appeared it had. Jim Mapes and Joe Sayre, aided somewhat by Mrs. Biggles’s husband, had walked east and west almost to the stations on either side of Lone Cove. There was much driftwood from the lost ship. Some tinned provisions had come ashore but seemed hopelessly spoiled. And one body.
“Found it well up on the beach about two miles east,” Jim Mapes told the keeper. “That of the captain. Biggles took it over to Bellogue. I kept the papers he had on him. Put ’em on your desk, Cap’n.”
“Look ’em over later,” the keeper remarked. “Did Biggles take off that fo’c’s’le scum?”
“He did.”
“And a good riddance,” declared the keeper. “Evil-looking fellow, if I ever saw one. A squarehead, too. Some Dutch name or other—Dirk or Derrick or just plain Dirt. The owners said to let him go. But the curious thing is they couldn’t tell me what I wanted to know.”
He glanced at the small girl beside him. She had finished her supper and sat back in her chair, looking a little timidly and a little sleepily at the men. Cap’n Smiley interrupted his meal to carry her to his room whence, after an interval, he returned grinning happily.
“Eyes closed as soon as she was in bed,” he informed his crew. Then his forehead wrinkled again as he sat down.
“The owners,” he explained, “say that the captain was unmarried. The mate had a wife but no children. The second was a youngster and single. There was no passenger, not even one signed on as ‘medical officer’ or anything like that. The ship was direct from San Francisco, 130 days out. The child must have come aboard before she sailed, but there is no record to show who she is. Have any of you talked to her?”
“I have,” Ho Ha answered. “Easy-like, you know, Cap’n. She says she hasn’t any name. The captain looked after her and she lived in a spare cabin. The steward she remembers because he was kind to her and because he was lame. She had never seen any one aboard before she came on the ship. Doesn’t know how she got there. Woke up to find herself in the cabin and the ‘bed rocking.’ Before being on the boat she lived with ‘a tall lady’ whom she called Auntie. Just Auntie, nothing else. It was in the country, some place near Frisco, maybe. On shipboard the captain and the steward called her ‘little girl’ when they called her anything. None of the others spoke to her.”
Most of the men had finished eating. Cap’n Smiley got up and went to his desk. He picked up the papers that had been washed ashore with the body of the Mermaid’s skipper. There were certain of the ship’s papers, a little memorandum book with no entries, and a personal letter. The ink had run badly on the soaked documents and the letter was illegible except for a few words. These were far apart and decipherable after much pains.