Keats pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and came forward.
“The name of the man we want,” the detective began, “is Charles Lyell Adam. Charles Lyell Adam came from a very wealthy Vermont family. He was an only child and when his parents died he inherited all their money. But Adam wasn’t interested in money. Or, as far as we know, in women, liquor, or good times. He was educated abroad, he never married, and he kept pretty much to himself.
“He was a gentleman, a scholar, and an amateur scientist. His field was naturalism. He devoted all his time to it. He was never attached to a museum, or a university, or any scientific organization that we’ve been able to dig up. His money made it possible for him to do as he liked, and what he liked to do most was tramp about the world studying the flora and fauna of out-of-the-way places.
“His exact age,” continued Keats, after referring to his notes, “isn’t known. The Town Hall where his birth was recorded went up in smoke around 1910, and there was no baptismal record ― at least, we haven’t located one. Attempts to fix his age by questioning old residents of the Vermont town where he was born have produced conflicting testimony ― we couldn’t find any kin. We weren’t able to find anything on him in the draft records of the First World War ― he can’t be located either as a draftee or an enlisted man. Probably he got some sort of deferment, although we haven’t been able to turn up anything on this, either. About all we can be sure of is that, in the year 1925, when Adam organized an expedition bound for the Guianas, he was anywhere from twenty-seven to thirty-nine years old.
“For this expedition,” said Keats, “Adam had a special boat built, a fifty-footer equipped with an auxiliary engine and scientific apparatus of his own design. Exactly what he was after, or what he was trying to prove scientifically, no one seems to know. But in the summer of ‘25 Adam’s boat, Beagle, cleared Boston Harbor and headed down the coast.
“It stopped over in Cuba for repairs. There was a long delay. When the repairs were finished, the Beagle got under way again. And that was the last anybody saw or heard of the Beagle, or Charles Lyell Adam, or his crew. The delay ran them into hurricane weather and, after a thorough search turned up no trace of the vessel, the Beagle was presumed to have gone down with all hands.
“The crew,” said Lieutenant Keats, “consisted of two men, each about forty years old at the time, each a deepwater sailor of many years’ experience, like Adam himself. We’ve got their names ― their real names ― but we may as well keep calling them by the names they took in 1927: Leander Hill and Roger Priam.”
Keats shot the name at the bearded man in the wheelchair as if it were a tennis ball; and, like spectators at the match, they turned their heads in unison to Priam. And Priam clutched the arms of his chair, and he bit his lip until a bright drop appeared. This drop he licked; another appeared and it oozed into his beard. But he met their eyes defiantly.
“All right,” he rumbled. “So now you know it. What about it?”
It was as if he were grounded on a reef and gamely mustering his forces of survival against the winds.