“We talked together for a little while, and it did not take me long to discover that the master was as thoroughbred as the hound; in fact, he impressed one as a trifle too finely bred—_in_bred, possibly. He was _too_ delicately charming—six feet in height, gracefully and slenderly built, very fair, with the pure complexion and blue eyes of a very pretty girl. I almost laughed when he presently confided in me that he was taking the voyage in the hope of overcoming the liquor habit. I suspected that there was a girl in the case—that Claud was in love and had conceived that he was in danger of becoming addicted to the vice because he sometimes drank a glass of beer when in college.
“As we were chatting together the hound walked suddenly to me and raised his handsome head as if inviting a caress.
“‘That is unusual,’ said Claud. ‘His reception of people is often embarrassing. He will not go near Captain Deshay. He is too polite to growl; he simply gets out of the way, but he can’t keep his hair from bristling a little.’
“I asked Claud presently if he had met the mate, and he said that he had not, that he had not even seen him, which I thought rather singular. Claud told me that we had another fellow-passenger, a Professor Lentz, a scientist, not a mere collector like myself. He added that Professor Lentz was below, engaged in storing a wagon-load of instruments for recording everything from a falling star to his last bottle of beer. A little while later I met him, and he proved to be a genial, if somewhat secretive, old crank, who apparently had some complex theory regarding ocean currents which he was afraid that some of us might try to steal.
“Captain Deshay came aboard at noon, and with him came a squat, heavily bearded individual, who proved to be the mate. Deshay himself was a well-educated man, of very finished manners and strikingly handsome in a rather animal way. The casual observer would have described his face as strong, but it was not—it was well-featured; but he had a lumpish jaw, which is different from a masterful jaw, and his eyes were petulant rather than determined. His manner was inclined to be loud, authoritative and with a coarse _bonhomie_ always repellant to me. The most assertive thing about him was a big voice, and a big voice is scarcely ever associated with cold-blooded courage; it belongs to the blustering, bullying kind.