So foreign to Hastings’ blunt directness was the finesse of intrigue that even the unsuspecting mate was not drawn off his guard. Coming, as he thought, adroitly to the subject that filled his mind, Hastings was surprised by the sudden change in the second officer’s attitude.
“I suppose,” he had remarked, in a voice carefully casual, “Captain Widmer has no children.”
The officer’s attitude seemed all at once a little less friendly. Raising his eyes to the dark heavens, he remarked, “It’s a raw night, for all there’s no great of a wind.”
“I suppose,” Hastings repeated, more loudly, “Captain Widmer—”
“It’s al’ays seemed hard lines to me that the Lord didn’t put monsoons in the north Atlantic. Think o’ the good they’d do thereabouts! To be sure, typhoons is a curse. But there’s the trades, say. Now, if the Lord had only seed fit—”
“Damn the trades, I say. Did Captain Widmer ever have a child?”
The other took his pipe from his mouth and eyed the master of the Helen of Troy speculatively. “It don’t do, sir,” he replied, with a cautious glance about, “to ask questions aboard this vessel. A child, you say? There was a child. But—” again glancing aft, the man lowered his voice to a whisper, “I mistrust it warn’t his’n.”
The next day the two captains met for the first time at dinner in the cabin, Hastings silent, Widmer smiling with his lips, in spite of mirthless eyes.
For a time neither spoke. The boy, in mute testimony to the fit of ill temper that had beset Widmer, scurried hack and forth in obvious terror. As the ship rolled, the water in the glasses and the wine in the decanter rocked this way and that. It was Widmer, as usual, who broke the silence. “I have heard,” he said in his low voice, “that some one was listening outside my door last night. If any man in my crew were caught there, I’d have him pitched to the sharks.”
“Do you mean that I—”