“And you, Captain Williamson? You have voyaged about these seas for the best part of a generation--have you never been confronted by one of these inexplicable phenomena of which the travellers tell us?”
There was just a little of Oliver Wendell Holmes pedantry about the professor--a touch of that Boston of the ’eighties in which he had been educated.
Captain Williamson changed the duck-clad leg which crossed the other and smiled a little with his keen gray eyes. Caressing the neat pointed beard which accentuated the oval of his intelligent face, he replied thoughtfully:
“Well, Professor--I have. Once. Personally, though I saw the affair with my own eyes, I don’t even now know what to make of it. Perhaps your hypnotic theory might explain it.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Will you not tell us the story?” entreated the professor. “It is so rare to receive trustworthy first-hand evidence of anything abnormal.”
Captain Williamson glanced rather diffidently around upon his companions.
“Fire away, cap’en!” exclaimed one of the merchants, slapping him amicably on the knee. “You’ve always got a good yarn!”
“This happens to be a true one,” said the captain, with a smile of tolerance, “but, of course, you are under no compulsion to believe it!”
“Drinks all round on the one who doesn’t!” decreed the planter. “Go ahead! Don’t ask us to believe rubber is going to boom again, that’s all. Short of that, we’ll believe anything.”
“Well,” began Captain Williamson, his eyes following reflectively the long, deliberate puff of smoke he blew into the air, “perhaps some of you may remember Captain Strong--‘lucky Jim Strong’? Twenty-five years or so ago he was one of the best known skippers in the Pacific, celebrated almost. Men talked of him with a certain awe as of a man who had a good fortune that was nothing short of uncanny. He had been engaged in all sorts of desperate enterprises, frequently illicit, such as seal-poaching in the Russian preserves, gun-running under the nose of British cruisers, gold or opium smuggling despite the patrol-boats of the Chinese Customs Board, and always he emerged unharmed and gorged with profits. Only all the San Francisco banks put together, for he dealt with all of them, could tell you what he was worth, but it was certainly a very large sum. However wealthy he was, he apparently derived very little enjoyment from his money. He was always at sea in his ship, the _Mary Gleeson_, of which he was both owner and skipper, and stayed in port only just long enough to discharge one cargo and pick up another. His personal habits were almost unknown, but of course a legend of eccentricity grew up around them as a companion to the legend of his supernatural luck.