"How did you ever come to be here, Jefferson?" he asked, irrelevantly. "It's rather a long way from the land of progress and liberty."
Jefferson laughed in a somewhat curious fashion. "Well," he said, "others have asked me, but I'll tell you, and I've told Miss Gascoyne. I had a good education, and I'm thankful for it now. There is money in the family, but it was born in most of us to go to sea. I went because I had to, and it made trouble. The man who had the money had plotted out quite a different course for me. Still, I did well enough until the night the Sachem—there are several of them, but I guess you know the one I mean—went down. I was mate, but it wasn't in my watch the Dutchman struck her."
"Ah!" said Austin softly, "that explains a good deal! It wasn't exactly a pleasant story."
He eat looking at his companion with grave sympathy as the details of a certain grim tragedy in which the brutally handled crew had turned upon their persecutors when the ship was sinking under them came back to him. Knowing tolerably well what usually happens when official enquiry follows upon a disaster at sea, he had a suspicion that the truth had never become altogether apparent, though the affair had made a sensation two or three years earlier. Still, while Jefferson had not mentioned his part in it, he had already exonerated him.
"It was so unpleasant that I couldn't find a shipping company on our side who had any use for the Sachem's mate," he said, and his voice sank a little. "Of course, it never all came out, but there were more than two of the men who went down that night who weren't drowned. Well, what could you expect of a man with a pistol when the one friend he had in that floating hell dropped at his feet with his head adzed open. That left me and Nolan aft. He was a brute—a murdering, pitiless devil; but there were he and I with our backs to the jigger-mast, and a few of the rest left who meant that we should never get into the quarter-boat."
Austin was a trifle startled. "You told Miss Gascoyne that?" he said. "How did she take it?"
Jefferson made a curious little gesture. "Of course," he said simply. "I had to. She believed in me; but do you think I'm going to tell—you—how it hurt her?"
It was borne in upon Austin that, after all, he understood very little about women. A few days earlier it would have seemed impossible to him that a girl with Muriel Gascoyne's straitened views should ever have linked her life with one who had played a leading part in that revolting tragedy. Now, however, it was evident that there was very little she would not do for the man who loved her.
"I'm sorry! You'll excuse it," he said. "Still, that scarcely explains how you came to Las Palmas."
"I came as deck-hand on board a barque bringing tomato boxes over. They were busy at the coaling wharf just then, and I got put on. You know the rest of it. I was left forty thousand dollars."