“We picked up the poor chap at sea, half-drowned, and bleeding from a very terrible cut across the forehead; and such a slender thin shaving of a boy that you would not have known him to be the same as he is now!”
“Indeed!” said Ernest Wilton with greater interest even than he had displayed before; and thereupon Mr Rawlings told the whole story of Sailor Bill’s rescue, and how he afterwards saved the life of Seth Allport, to whom he had thenceforward attached himself; and how the worthy sailor had refused to part with him, and brought him out west.
The young engineer had been carefully noting all the points of the narrative while the other was speaking; and seemed to revolve the whole circumstances of Sailor Bill’s history in his mind with a view to solving the mystery.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said he, when Mr Rawlings had completed his yarn, “if he belonged to that deserted ship which you subsequently came across; and that in the mutiny, or whatever else occurred on board, he got wounded and thrown into the sea.”
“That is possible,” said Mr Rawlings, “but not quite probable, considering the time that elapsed after our saving him to meeting with the water-logged vessel, and the distance we traversed in the interval. Besides, the boy was lashed to the spar that supported him in the water, and he couldn’t have done that, with the wound he had received, by himself; so that gets rid of the theory of his being half-murdered and pitched overboard. Altogether, the story is one of those secrets of the sea that will never be unravelled, unless he comes to his senses at some time or other and tells us all about it!”
“And you don’t know his name, or anything?”
“No, only just what I have told you.”
“Had he no marks on his clothing, or anything in his pockets, that might serve for identification, should any one claim him by and by?” said Ernest Wilton, pursuing his interrogatories like a cross-examining barrister fussy over his first case.
“He had nothing on but his shirt and trousers, I tell you,” said Mr Rawlings, laughing at what he called the badgering of the other, just as if he were in a witness-box, he said, “and boys don’t carry many letters or documents about them, especially in their trousers’ pockets; at all events, they didn’t do so when I was a boy. Stay—” he added, bethinking himself suddenly of one item of the story he had apparently forgotten till then,—“I certainly passed over something.”
“What?” said Ernest, still looking at Sailor Bill steadfastly, as if trying in vain to summon up the recollection of his features from the hazy depths of his memory; for the face of the boy seemed more and more familiar to him the longer he looked.