On my way home, my path led not far from the burial lot. I found the stone without difficulty and read the inscription.
The following summer, soon after we arrived, I paid my second visit to the Knox farm. I found the captain sitting on his porch, smoking. He didn’t remember me at first; but suddenly he burst out with, “Wall, I swan! You’re the young man that was tryin’ to tack in a dory without a center-board. I remember you, o’ course. Pretty good stuff, eh,” he added, “to tackle such a wind when you knew next to nothin’ o’ the sea. You’d make a good one, I’ll warrant.”
After that I often went to see him. He became quite loquacious at times and recounted some of his adventures. Always I expected he would run up against the mystery, but he never did. Few women were to be found in his stories.
One day I was surprised to see the captain at my door, seated in a new motor car. He had come to take me for a drive. I looked the machine over carefully.
“How does she go?” I asked.
“She sets all right,” he replied, cheerfully, “but she’s a bit wide in the stern.”
As we drove off together, he seemed in the best of spirits, although he admitted he was a “little nervous navigatin’ the new craft.”
On the way back, the captain became confidential. His story this time was concerned chiefly with a long sickness he had had in the Far East, and his romantic experience with a Malay girl. “She was a ripper, she was,” he added by way of comment.
“What was her name?” I inquired, with suppressed excitement, but he was intent upon turning a corner and did not answer. The next moment we were at the door of my house. He waved me good-bye as he disappeared around a bend in the road.