“I didn't dream about that. I know it was a harbor, though; because we were tied up to a ring on a white wall and all the face of the stone under water was covered with wood to prevent our ram getting chipped when the tide made us rock.”
“That's curious. Our hero commanded the galley? Didn't he?”
“Didn't he just! He stood by the bows and shouted like a good 'un. He was the man who killed the overseer.”
“But you were all drowned together, Charlie, weren't you?”
“I can't make that fit quite,” he said with a puzzled look. “The galley must have gone down with all hands and yet I fancy that the hero went on living afterward. Perhaps he climbed into the attacking ship. I wouldn't see that, of course. I was dead, you know.”
He shivered slightly and protested that he could remember no more.
I did not press him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in ignorance of the workings of his own mind, deliberately introduced him to Mortimer Collins's “Transmigration,” and gave him a sketch of the plot before he opened the pages.
“What rot it all is!” he said, frankly, at the end of an hour. “I don't understand his nonsense about the Red Planet Mars and the King, and the rest of it. Chuck me the Longfellow again.”
I handed him the book and wrote out as much as I could remember of his description of the sea-fight, appealing to him from time to time for confirmation of fact or detail. He would answer without raising his eyes from the book, as assuredly as though all his knowledge lay before flint on the printed page. I spoke under the normal key of my voice that the current might not be broken, and I know that he was not aware of what he was saying, for his thoughts were out on the sea with Longfellow.
“Charlie,” I asked, “when the rowers on the galleys mutinied how did they kill their overseers?”