And after that Seal left the office as quickly as he could, in order to give vent outside to his private opinion of the firm and their line of ships. This he did very forcibly, in language that only a Mediterranean skipper is in the habit of using.
Now that I was back again, enjoying the comfort of my own shabby little sitting-room after the small, stuffy cabin of the Thrush, one rather curious incident caused me to reflect.
It occurred on the morning after the loss of the Seahorse. The squall had gone down. We had passed the Nore and were steaming full ahead into the mouth of the Thames. I had been seated on the bridge with Seal and Thorpe for a couple of hours or so when I had occasion to descend to my cabin.
On entering I found an intruder in the person of Harding, the seaman who had been told off as the keeper of the Mysterious Man. He did not notice my approach, for I had on a pair of tennis shoes with rubber soles, therefore I stood in the doorway for a few moments watching him.
He had spread open that document with the seven signatures that had so puzzled me, and with paper and pencil seemed to be scribbling some notes as to its purport. Strange, I thought, that a common seaman could decipher those ill-written lines of Latin where I had so entirely failed. So I watched and saw how, with his head bent to the open port-hole in order to obtain a good light, he was carefully deciphering the words contained there, and I detected by the expression on his countenance that what he found entirely satisfied him. Upon the small piece of paper in his palm he scribbled something now and then, and was just slipping it into his pocket, when I asked in a hard voice: —
“Well, what are you doing here?”
He turned with a start, his face flushed in confusion, and stammered: —
“Nothing, doctor. I—I was only looking at this old parchment you got out of Noah’s Ark.”
“You’ve been reading it,” I said. “I’ve watched you making some extracts from it. Give me that paper.”
He made a movement to place it in his pocket, but at the same moment I snatched the old document from his other hand and arrested his effort to conceal the scrap of paper.