"I never changed mine in my life."
"And if you had, I don't suppose you'd have changed it to one so notorious as George Gordon."
"Notorious?"
"It was a George Gordon who was the hero of that piratical affair; that mutiny on board the Morning Star."
"Ah, to be sure. And an awful villain too! A man I met in Australia knew Gordon well. But he tells a curious tale, though. He was a doctor, that Gordon; had come last from somewhere in Kirkcudbrightshire."
"He did," said Thomas Carr, quietly. "What curious tale does your friend tell?"
"Well, sir, he says—or rather said, for I've not seen him since my first visit there—that George Gordon did not sail in the Morning Star. He was killed in a drunken brawl the night before he ought to have sailed: this man was present and saw him buried."
"But there's pretty good proof that Gordon did sail. He was the ringleader of the mutiny."
"Well, yes. I don't know how it could have been. The man was positive. I never knew Gordon; so that the affair did not interest me much."
"You are doing well over there?"