"I'll tell you about it, then; but I wish my mother was here, with the letters my father wrote to her."
"We are willing to believe all you say, Stumpy," said the landlord.
"You thought that what I said would not hold water, just now."
"But I explained why I thought so."
"And the doubt was certainly a reasonable one," added the merchant; "now we only wait for you to remove it."
"I will do that and I can prove all I say by my father's last letter to my mother, which is post-marked at Gloucester, Mass., in which he told all about the fight, and gave the reasons why he cleared out."
In answer to a question asked by one of the ladies, Stumpy related more fully the particulars of Joel Wormbury's departure from Rockhaven.
"About six months before my father went off for the last time, he returned to Gloucester from a fishing trip to the Georges," continued Stumpy. "He expected to go again in a few weeks; so he left his chest in Gloucester. His Bible was in that chest; but, as he found work coopering at home, he did not go again till he left after the fight. In his letter to my mother, he said he had got his chest, and that he had the Bible all right. He wrote, too, that he meant to read it more than he had ever done before, and not use it to scribble in. That was the last letter we ever got from father. We heard that he had gone out to attend to the trawls, and was lost in a fog, not being able to find his way back to the vessel. Of course we hadn't any doubt that he was dead, after we got a letter from the captain of the schooner in which my father sailed. That's all I know about it."
"But how came he in Havana?" asked Mr. Hamilton.
"That's more than I know, sir," answered Stumpy.