“Oh, pooh! He’s one of them high and lofty thinkers that wouldn’t bother his head about ignorant, every-day cusses like us,” sleepily replied Johnny Kent as he kicked off his shoes.
“You fool yourself,” and O’Shea spoke with decision. “He is full of big words and things that I do not pretend to understand at all, but he is not wrapped up in them entirely, like most of the professors and such. There is a pair of keen eyes behind those gold-rimmed spectacles of his, Johnny, and he is not missing anything that goes on.”
“I take notice that he ain’t overlookin’ that handsome school-teacher that’s been studyin’ abroad for a year. His eyes are sharp enough to sight her whenever she comes on deck. And she ain’t hostile to him, either.”
“I grant ye that, you sentimental old pirate,” said O’Shea, “but I am not a match-maker, and ’tis no concern of mine. What I am wondering is whether the man is really a university professor bent on ‘investigating the scientific education of the United States.’”
“You’re welcome to sit up and hatch mysteries by yourself,” grumbled the other. “I want to go to sleep. What’s the clew to all this, Cap’n Mike? What makes you so darned suspicious?”
“’Tis no more than a hunch, Johnny. I’m Irish, and my people feel things in the air. We don’t have to be told. This Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz does not ring true. There is a flaw in him somewhere.”
“Well, we’re sort of travellers in disguise ourselves, ain’t we, Cap’n Mike? I feel plumb full of false pretences. The pot calls the kettle black. How about that?”
“’Tis our own business,” snapped O’Shea.
“So is his,” briefly concluded Johnny Kent as he crawled into the bunk. No more than five minutes later he was snoring with the rhythm and volume of a whistling buoy in a swinging sea. O’Shea lay awake for some time, trying to fit his uneasy surmises together, or to toss them aside as so much rubbish. He had not heard the banshee cry, but a vague conjecture had fastened itself in his mind that something was fated to go wrong with this voyage of the Alsatian. And without tangible cause or reason, he found this foreboding interwoven with the presence on board of the affable, mild-mannered, studious Professor Ernst Wilhelm Vonderholtz.
Sailormen are notably superstitious, and O’Shea had been schooled to beware of cross-eyed Finns in the forecastle and black cats in the cabin. But surely no tradition of the sea held it an ill omen to have on board a blond scientist with gold-rimmed spectacles and a well-cut beard who was seeking information among the technical schools and universities of the United States.