“Well, then, here is all I know,” was his answer, given with no very good grace. “It was this way. Some three weeks back my mate and I were in our boat at the end of the wharf. The Eagle was the name of the craft. We were mending a torn sail, me and my mate, when along comes a fine gentleman, Sir George Keith, no less, as we afterward learned. He had his sword dangling at his side, and was mincing his steps in the mud. He hailed us and wanted to know what we’d hire out the Eagle for?”
“‘How long?’ I says. ‘A year and a day,’ says he, and he looked at me, and smiled in a queer sort of a way. By that I knew he was bound on a voyage he couldn’t see the end of.[of.]
“‘Oh, it’s to buy the boat you want,’ says I, smelling a bargain, and he nodded his head. Well, I asked him fifty pounds, and he gave it over with never a word. I asked him when he wanted the craft, and he says in an hour’s time. So me and my mate took ashore what baggage we had and went to the tavern, where we were lately, to drink to the success of our bargain. A little while after we seen a sailor with a cock eye come down to the wharf, and he begun to load provisions into the Eagle.”
I stopped the progress of the tale.
“Was the sailor one with a scar on the left cheek, and a blur or cock of the right eye?” I asked.
“He was that,” answered the former owner of the Eagle.
“My old acquaintance, Simon the sailor, who urged the men to force me to surrender Pemaquid,” I whispered to myself. Verily he was becoming my evil genius.
“Being curious,” resumed the Eagle’s captain, “me and my mate hid where we could watch the boat. At dusk we saw Sir George come down to the wharf and he was leading by the hand a woman or maid, close wrapped in a gray cloak.”
I could not repress a start.
“Well, what then?” I asked.