“You mean the old Sea-Lark?” put in Jack.
The watchman nodded.
“I know where she is,” observed the boy. “I’ve climbed aboard her several times. She’s lying a couple of hundred yards from the river now.”
“Well,” Cap’n Crumbie went on, “that night, just when the gale was starting, your father left the office with the money he’d drawn from the bank to pay off the crew of the Grace and Ella. It was in a canvas bag, notes and silver together, and he didn’t like leaving it at the office all night. I was coming down High Street, when I met the parson, and we walked along together a ways. It was hard going and all-fired dark, when we turned down Wharf Street and fell right over your father. He was lying all in a heap on the sidewalk. I didn’t know it was him at first, mind you, because it was so dark. Parson and me tried to get him onto his feet, but he was all limp, like a wet string, and so we carried him into Simmons’s house, and there we saw who it was. When he recovered a bit he told us he’d been robbed. He had no idea who’d done it. All he knew was that he was hurrying along, with his head bent down, when some one laid hold of him. Then he got a smashing blow on the head, and didn’t know anything more until he came to in Simmons’s kitchen.”
“And the police never found any clue?” Jack asked.
“Not as I ever heard of. But Simon Barker went nearly crazy. You’d have thought, by the way he fussed, that Sam Holden was the biggest criminal unhung. Barker lost his head. He’s that mean he hates to see a mosquito walking on his wall-paper ’cause it’s wearing out the paper. You’d have thought it was him that had been half killed instead of Sam Holden. He swore ’twas a put-up job, and that your father had done it himself somehow, to get away with the money. And mighty unpopular he made himself by saying such things. Some of us told him what we thought o’ him, next day, and then he began to calm down a bit, but by that time the thief had covered up his tracks, and nobody has ever heard any explanation o’ what happened, from that day to this. It cost your father his partnership in the business, ’cause he had too much pride to go on working with a man who had as good as called him a thief, and he sold his home to replace the money that was stolen. I did hear that Simon Barker came near dropping dead when your dad handed it to him. You see, if things had been t’other way round, Barker couldn’t have brought himself to do such a thing in a month o’ Sundays, and so he couldn’t understand any one else doing it. Your father wasn’t obliged to pay the money to Barker, o’ course. If a thing gets stole, it’s stole, and that’s all there is to it. But your father wanted to clear his name. And he did, don’t you ever doubt it, Jack! Maybe Barker still has a sneaking notion that it was a put-up job, but if he does I can’t see how he figures your father made anything by it!”
“How can he?” protested Jack.
Cap’n Crumbie shook his head, and cast a glance in the direction of the tug Simon P. Barker, which was being coaled noisily at its owner’s wharf thirty yards away.
“I ain’t no Shylock Holmes, son,” he said. “Maybe he thinks what he says, and maybe he says what he don’t think. I shouldn’t faint right now if some one told me here and now that Barker knew more than your father did about the robbery.”
“You don’t mean—”