He was called Captain Adoniram Tugg, a Connecticut Yankee, and skipper of a two-stick schooner called the Sea Spell. He followed an odd business. He was a wild animal trapper, and gathered Natural History specimens of many kinds for museums and menageries. He had just disposed of his last season’s catch, had shipped the last specimen northward by steamship, and was about to sail for the Straits of Magellan again, near which he had his headquarters.
“To tell you the truth, the Professor and me are partners. He’s an odd stick,” quoth Captain Tugg, after supper, as we sat on the broad step before Maria Debora’s door, and he smoked the native cheroots while I listened. “He ain’t been in a civilized town like this since I’ve knowed him. For a l’arned chap, and a New Englander, he seems to have lost all curiosity, and, I reckon, he’s got a grouch on the rest of mankind.”
“How long did you say you had known him?” I asked, idly.
“All of twelve year. He come to my camp one day. Just walked up to the door like he’d come here and knock. But I didn’t suppose there was another white man within five hundred miles—’nless he was aboard some craft beating through the straits.
“He was civil spoken enough; but he never would open up. Most fellows meeting that sort o’ way,” continued Captain Tugg, puffing reflectively, “would git chummy. The Professor’s never told me a thing about himself. As fur as I know he was born full growed, right there on the rocks where my shanty’s built, and ain’t got kith nor kin—fam’bly or enemy—just as lonely as Adam was in Eden before the trouble began!
“Yet,” said the captain, “to look at the Professor, you’d know there was never nothing crooked about his partner. And I have—but nothing about his past. Only I’m willing to put up real money that whatever happened to Professor Vose was something that was caused by no fault of his. He’s always been sad. Never heard him laugh. He’s the kindest man ye ever see, son. And if one o’ them Injun’s sick, or the like, he treats ’em like a sure-’nough hospital sawbones.
“Then he is a physician?” I asked suddenly.
“I reckon he’s most anything that a man kin l’arn out o’ books,” declared Captain Tugg. “He sent by me to Buenos Ayres here, first trip I made after we’d gone partners in the animal biz, for the greatest old outfit of drugs and the like you ever see. The natives come flockin’ to him for miles an’ miles. He’s one big medicine man, all right, all right!”
“And I look like him?” I queried.
“By the e-tar-nal snakes! you sartainly favor him, son,” declared the captain, enthusiastically. “Why! ye might be his son. Got the same features. The Professor keeps clean shaven. Hair like him, too, now I looks at ye. And your voice—Well! it does beat all how near like him you be. Sure you ain’t got no relative named Vose?”