“Marsh ague—marsh ague,” put in the cleric quickly. “Get it often in this place. Poor old Pepper used to tell me that it was the result of malaria I once had badly in Charleston, Carolina; nearly lost my life with it. Mosquito poisoning which brought on raging malaria. I dare say he was right: I’m a frequent sufferer. As soon as the mists rise from the Marsh I get the shivers.”
“Ah, then there falls one of my points to the ground. Still I have another ready. Suppose we grant that your attack of ague had nothing to do with your sudden meeting with this man.”
“Of course it hadn’t,” muttered the Doctor. “Absurd!”
“Very well, then, did you notice that the entire weight of the rum barrel was carried by Bill Spiker, the gunner?”
“No,” said the Doctor, “I didn’t notice that.”
“No more did Bill Spiker,” said the captain; “you can lay to that, or he would have soon raised objections; but I did notice it, because it’s my business to note which of my men work hardest, you understand; for in cases of preferment I have to give my opinion.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with the case,” said the Doctor. “It’s a common enough complaint to find a man shirking work.”
“Not when the man who shirks is an enthusiastic and willing worker. That’s what made me wonder in the first place, and I’ve now come to the conclusion that whenever the mulatto was ordered to work alone—alone, mind you, without the help of the other seamen—why, he could accomplish anything, but when he was working with anybody, he seemed, in spite of himself, to become singularly useless.”
“You call yourself dense, Captain, and you affirm that I am not; but you seem to have a keener perception of the abstruse and vague than I have, or can even follow.”
“You will be able to follow me in a moment,” said the captain humbly. “I fear it is the poor way in which I am getting to the point; but I have to tell things in my own way, not being given to talk much.”
“Go on, then, in your own way,” said the cleric.
“I then recollected that in my short acquaintance with this mulatto I never remember to have seen him in actual contact with anyone, or anything. And I also recollect a strong tendency among the men to avoid him—in fact, to keep out of any personal contact with him.”
“Natural enough,” explained the cleric. “It is the white man’s antipathy toward a native. Perfectly natural.”
“Perfectly,” agreed Captain Collyer. “And I think we may add the Englishman’s antipathy toward the uncanny and mysterious.”
“I dare say,” said Doctor Syn.
“I am sure of it,” went on the captain. “Indeed, I went so far as to ask the bo’sun, who has had most dealings with the fellow, whether he had ever touched him.”
“Touched him? What do you mean?” asked the parson, who began dimly to see what the other was driving at.
“Touched, touched him,” repeated the captain with emphasis. “The bo’sun told me ‘No’ and that he wouldn’t care about it, for he considered that ‘a weird-looking cove’—I’ll use his precise way of expressing it—that ‘a weird-looking cove with a face like a dead ’un, what never took food nor drink to his knowledge, weren’t the sort of cove that a respectable seaman wanted to touch.’ ”
Jerry looked at the Doctor. He was as white as the snowy tablecloth before him. Yet he still feigned not to quite follow the captain’s meaning.
“And now,” asked the captain, “mad as it sounds, do you see any connection between the two cases? It’s plain to any traveller or reader of travel books that some of these foreign rascals, especially the priests, possess strange, weird gifts that the white man’s brain runs short of, and I want to know if you see any connection between the two cases.”
Doctor Syn’s hand was trembling, so much so that the long clay pipe stem snapped between his finger and thumb. Neither seemed to notice this, though the lighted ashes had fallen out of the bowl upon the tablecloth and had burned innumerable holes in it before going out.
“Do you see any connection, Doctor Syn?” asked the captain, leaning right over the table and bringing his face close to the cleric.
Doctor Syn did not answer.
The captain repeated the sentence once more—with all the emphasis and force that he could put into his compelling voice:
“Any connection between the Cuban priest who was able to commit deliberate murder after death by controlling the enormous will power of his revenge upon that one definite object? Do you see any connection, I say, between that man and a man who was marooned upon a coral reef in the Southern Pacific being able to follow his murderer across the world in the beastly hulk of his dead self? I don’t understand it, nor do you, perhaps, but I fancy that I see the semblance of a connection, and what I want to know is, can you?”
Then Doctor Syn did a surprising thing: He slowly raised his face to the level of the captain’s, then brought his eyes to meet the captain’s gaze, and then, drawing his lips apart, laying his white teeth bare, he slowly drew over his face, from the very depths of his soul, it seemed, a smile—a fixed smile that steadily beamed all over him for at least a quarter of a minute before he said:
“You most remarkable man! A King’s captain, eh? I vow you have mistaken your calling.” And he deliberately and with the flat of his white hand patted the captain’s rough cheek, patted it as though the captain were a child being petted or a puppy being teased.
“What the thunder do you mean?” roared the infuriated officer, “by calling? Mistake my
