Kit was beginning by this time to chafe over the delay in getting at the mysterious information. But the other enclosure must give it, and he quickly unfolded the sheet.
State Department, Washington, D. C. [it began].
Office of the Fourth Assistant Secretary.
Folio G x R. No. 2814 F.
Messrs. Bryant & Williams, Bridgeport, Conn.
Dear Sirs: The department is informed by the Consulate at Wellington, New Zealand, that a patient who has been in the public hospital there for some months is supposed to be a shipwrecked American sailor. This man was landed in Wellington from the British ship, Prince Albert, having been picked up by that ship on the 27th of June last on a small unnamed island in the Pacific Ocean, where his three companions had died of hardship and starvation, and where he was reduced to such a mental and physical condition that he was unable to move or give any account of himself.
Since his reception in the hospital he has been restored to physical health, but he is still unable to give his name or place of residence, though from certain tests that have been applied it is believed that he is a native-born American citizen. He is of medium height with gray hair and beard, and looks sixty years old, though he is probably much younger.
The Life Saving Service has supplied this department with a list of all the American vessels that have been lost within the last two years; and a copy of this letter is sent to the owners of each of such lost vessels, as far as they can be traced, to enable them to communicate with the families of the lost crews.
Requests for information on the subject should be addressed to the Chairman of the Board of Governors, Public Hospital, Wellington, New Zealand; or to the American Consulate at that port.
Yours, etc.,
H. R. Battaway,
Chief Clerk to Fourth Assistant Secretary.
On opening the letter from Vieve he found that it was full of questions and surmises about the mysterious man in New Zealand, so he put that in his pocket to be read later on. The State Department letter was too important to let anything interfere with it. He read it again and again, and tried to estimate what the chances were that this man might be his missing father. Suppose there were twenty lost vessels, each with a crew of twenty men? That would give only one chance in four hundred. But one chance in forty thousand, he thought, would be a great thing. Sixty years old? His father was not nearly as old as that; and there was not a gray hair in his head. But who could say what suffering he might have gone through, or what changes it might have made in his appearance?
It was hard work to put those letters into his pocket and go on quietly checking his lists as the cargo came aboard; but it was necessary, and Kit did it. The engagement he had just made with Harry Leonard must be postponed, for he must have time to think, and then time to write some letters. But what was he to write?
All through the morning and until the last case of cargo on the wharf was put in the hold and duly checked off, the young supercargo stuck manfully to his work. Harry Leonard was disappointed when told that his trip to London would have to be put off, but when Kit explained the reason Harry was more than willing to wait.
“Why, they’d give him a big reception in Huntington,” he exclaimed, “if your father should come home alive.”
With all his thinking Kit could not decide upon a better course than to show the letters to Captain Griffith and ask his advice. “He knows more in five minutes than I know in a week,” he said to himself, “and his advice is sure to be good. It’s a valuable thing to have good friends to go to when you need advice.”
Captain Griffith, as he expected, was very much interested when he heard the contents of Kit’s letter. First he listened while Kit read the letter from the State Department, and then took it and read it carefully over himself. Then he got out a map to look at the position of Wellington, New Zealand.
For some minutes he leaned back in his revolving-chair, looking hard at the ceiling, deep in thought.
“It’s a strange case, Silburn,” he said at length. “I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to your father when his schooner went down. They took to the boats, and in the heavy sea your father’s boat went to pieces. He kept afloat on some piece of wreckage, and in the morning he was seen and picked up by a passing ship. She was an American ship, I should say, bound ’round the Horn for San Francisco or the northwest coast. But when they got into the Pacific that second ship was wrecked, and your father and three others made their way to a little island, where he was afterwards picked up by the British vessel and carried to New Zealand. Yes, it is all plain enough.”