I nodded, and drew up a chair beside him, and opened the volume to glance again across its pages and to dip here and there into that splendid chronicle of the hunt for the great white whale. The old man watched me over his pipe, and I looked up once and caught his eye.
“He’s stretching it a bit, of course,” I suggested. “You would never meet the same whale twice, in all the wastes of the Seven Seas.”
The cap’n’s eyes gleamed faintly. “Why not?” he asked.
“It’s too much of a coincidence.”
“It happens.”
One certain method to provoke Cap’n Brackett to narration is to pretend incredulity. I smiled in a wary fashion, and said nothing.
“There was one whale I saw four times, myself,” he asserted.
“How do you know it was the same?”
“He was marked. . . . And the hand of Fate was in it, too.”
I turned the leaves of the book, and chuckled provokingly, watching covertly the captain’s countenance; and, as I expected, he began presently to tell the story that was in his mind. His gruff old voice ran quietly along; the fire puffed and flared as the wind whistled down the chimney, the snow flurried past the windows and hid the harbor below us. Cap’n Brackett’s voice droned on.