Suddenly I was conscious of an old man in a dory, rowing towards me. He might have been Father Neptune risen from the depths of the ocean for all I knew. Without a word he pulled my dilapidated boat ashore. Safely landed, I thanked him. He was an old man with a long white beard. He had on a tarpaulin and looked like a sailor.
“Ay-es,” he said pleasantly, when he had moored the two boats to the wharf (he gave me no opportunity to assist him). “I thought you was a landlubber, the moment I set eyes on you. Ye can’t tack without a center-board,” he added with a smile, the first he had given me. I blushed feebly at my hopeless mistake.
“I thought,” I began weakly, but he didn’t wait for me to finish.
“Won’t you come into the house for a bit?” he asked kindly. “You’re wet through, ain’t ye?” And he led the way to the little low shingled structure, fronted by a long porch upon which sat a large Persian cat, the handsomest I had ever seen.
“Thar, thar, Daisy bird, you’ve had enough pettin’ for one day,” as he brushed her gently aside, adding, as he noticed my admiration, “Got another, better lookin’ of the two, in the kitching. Won’t ye come in?”
“You’re not Captain Knox, are you?” I asked.
“Right you be! Salathiel Knox, captain, retired you call it, don’t ye?” and he smiled again.
While my clothes were drying, we sat around the fire and talked, the captain still in his tarpaulin, while I languished in a richly figured rug which he had produced from a locked cupboard in the kitchen. “Bought it in Singapore twenty-four years ago,” he added by way of dismissal of my compunction at wearing so valuable a possession. The captain smoked mildly while I told him who I was, making few comments, but when I tried to lead the conversation around to his own life he proved a poor subject for questioning. As Mrs. Simmons said to me afterwards, “The captain can talk when he’s a mind to, but land sakes, when he ain’t, it’s no use.”
The captain did remark, as I was leaving, that although he lived alone he wasn’t a bachelor; his wife, he said, was dead. “She was a pretty creatur, she was,” he added, half regretfully, as he laid down his pipe.