“That is natural,” Mr. Gray explained later. “We never forget anything. It’s all hidden somewhere in our minds. But we keep track of things that interest us most and ‘forget’ or bury, the others. But if we try hard enough, and practice and keep at it, we can recall anything we want to.”
Finally—and it took time!—they got Jack to talk about his life in Porto Bello, not insisting on knowing how he came there, for he had “gone to the dogs” at that time and his brain was so befuddled by lust and bad habits that he had simply fallen into a state of indolence and drifted there.
They worked hard to get him to recall when Mort Beecher arrived, and after a time, Tom, by a fortunate remark, opened the gates of memory.
“Did he get shipwrecked?” he suggested.
“Now I recall,” Jack said, accepting a fresh smoke. “Yes, sir—my lad, I recall it plain. There was a great storm.”
Getting into the spirit of excitement as his story unfolded, he related the broad details of a great storm during which a boat had been, by the whim of tide and wind, swept over the barrier reefs and into calmer water. Of her occupants, three men, one alone swam to shore through the shark-ridden waters. It was Mort Beecher.
“He and me, we got chummy,” Mort’s acquaintance told them, while they listened with avidity. “But we took to using liquor too free, and I know he talked a heap to me, but only when he was ‘fired up’ with this native poison we have to use. I wasn’t in condition to listen and so I can’t tell you nothing. I don’t remember. But we stayed here, going from bad to worse, till a few days since—I don’t recall just what day, but another man come here from a sloop that lay-to off the reef, and he looked for a man named Mort Beecher—that’s how I recall his name, come to think, I heard him ask.
“But he wouldn’t have nothing to do with me—who would——?”
“We would, so forget that sort of talk!” commanded Bill. “Well, he only wanted Mort—for some private business, maybe?”
“It must be, but I don’t recall. I didn’t hear him. He gave Mort some money and Mort gave me a lot of—you know—” he lifted a hand as if it held a bottle, tilting back his hand, “and I went off and didn’t care, so long as I got what I come to crave for.”