CHAPTER II.
WHEREIN THE CAPTAIN KEEPS TO HIS OWN QUARTERS
Doctor Christobal brought some additional details to the dinner-table. He was not the ship’s doctor. The Kansas, built for freight rather than passengers, did not carry a surgeon on her roll; Dr. Christobal’s presence was due to Mr. Baring’s solicitude in his daughter’s behalf. It chanced that the courtly and gray-haired Spanish physician had relinquished his practise in Chile, and was about to pay a long-promised visit to a married daughter in Barcelona. Friendship, not unaided by a good fee, induced him to travel by the Kansas.
He had been called on to attend Mr. Boyle and the wounded Chilean, and he reported now that the chief officer’s injury was trifling, but the Chilean’s wound might incapacitate him during the remainder of the voyage.
“So far as I can gather,” he said, “Mr. Boyle had a narrow escape. These half-breeds have a nice anatomical knowledge of the situation of the lung; they also know the easiest way to reach it with a sharp instrument. Captain Courtenay fired as the knife fell, otherwise our first mate would have attended his own funeral this evening.”
“What was the cause of the affair?” Isobel asked.
“The man is not one of the ship’s crew, I understand. His name is Frascuelo, and it appears that he was engaged to place some bunker coal aboard early this morning. He says that he was drugged, and his clothes stolen; that he came off to the ship at a late hour, and that some one flung him headlong into a hold which, luckily for him, was nearly full of cotton bales. He was stunned by the fall, and were it not for Captain Courtenay’s custom of having all hatches taken off and a thorough examination of the cargo made before the holds are finally battened down for the voyage, Frascuelo might now be in a tight place in more than one sense.”
Dr. Christobal was proud of his idiomatic English. He spoke the language with the careless freedom of a Londoner.
“Frascuelo seems to have passed an eventful day,” said the little French Comte, who had been waiting anxiously for a chance to join in the conversation.
“But why should he want to kill poor Mr. Boyle?” inquired Isobel, after giving the Frenchman an encouraging glance. Incidentally, she smiled at Elsie. “Why puzzle one’s brains over foreign tongues when all the world speaks English?” she telegraphed.
“Mr. Boyle is a peculiar person,” said the doctor dryly. “I happen to have known him during some years. You and I might regard him as a man of few words, but he has acquired a wonderful vocabulary for the benefit of sailor-men. I believe he can swear in every known lingo. His accomplishment in that direction no doubt annoyed Frascuelo, who became frantic when he heard that the ship would not call at any South American port. I imagine, too, that the unfortunate fellow is still suffering from the drug which, he says, was administered to him. Anyhow, you know how the affair terminated.”