Stirling had struck hard luck, chicken farming over Oakland way. His chickens died as sailors die of scurvy at Herschel Island, and he wanted to quit the shore.
The sea and the Arctic called, and he had little money left. There was a chance for adventure in the Blubber Room that night; rumour had it that a ship was outfitting for a passage to East Cape, Siberia, and the unknown land around the Pole.
Stirling possessed a countenance stamped with the seal of misfortune—a face with which destiny loves to toy, the face of a rover and a castaway, yet withal, a strong face which would remain strong to the very end.
His eyes were dark brown and wide-set. His nose was long and divided full; round cheeks blood-veined to a purplish tinge that spoke not only of wind and weather, of the sea and brine, but also of the lees and dregs of a wanderer's life.
The figure of him, sitting at the table, seemed blocked from sturdy oak.
He eyed the patrons of the Blubber Room and concluded that the adventure he sought for was far away from that noisy, smoke-filled dive. There was but one occupant who looked capable of a desperate enterprise—the sailor—and this man sat hunched in a chair as if he had been drinking heavily of temperance-time alcohol.
Stirling studied the sailor's face and found lines in it which were slightly familiar. It brought to his mind the Revenue Service and a second lieutenant whom he had met off the Little Diomede Island in Bering Strait.
Turning from his scrutiny of the sailor, Stirling looked at the door of the Blubber Room through which two men stepped who would have attracted attention anywhere.
These men, glistening from the rain, took seats at a table and called for a bottle of light wine. One man was a Yankee, by his nasal undertones and tobacco-stained goatee. The other man was half the weight of the first, thin, alert, with a well-trimmed Vandyke beard over which glittered a pair of eyes that resembled gimlets in their pointed intensity.
Upon both of these men lay the badge of the sea—in their gestures, their pea-jackets, and their peculiar habit of always leaning against something, which is acquired on decks of ships.