er my waning
boatman.

"Ahoy--boat!" he called out, sharply, shielding his lips with his hand.
His violence seemed to bring him out of the blank, for he fell
immediately to puffing strongly at his cigar and explaining in rather a
shame-voiced way that he was beginning to think his own boatman had
"passed him up."

"Come in and have a nip," he urged with an abrupt heartiness, clapping
me on the shoulder.

"So you've--" I did not say what I had intended. I was thinking that in
the old days McCord had made rather a fetish of touching nothing
stronger than beer. Neither had he been of the shoulder-clapping sort.
"So you've got something aboard?" I shifted.

"Dead men's liquor," he chuckled. It gave me a queer feeling in the pit
of my stomach to hear him. I began to wish I had not come, but there was
nothing for it now but to follow him into the after-house. The cabin
itself might have been nine feet square, with three bunks occupying the
port side. To the right opened the master's stateroom, and a door in the
forward bulkhead led to the galley.

I took in these features at a casual glance. Then, hardly knowing why I
did it, I began to examine them with greater care.

"Have you a match?" I asked. My voice sounded very small, as though
something unheard of had happened to all the air.

"Smoke?" he asked. "I'll get you a cigar."

"No." I took the proffered match, scratched it on the side of the galley
door, and passed out. There seemed to be a thousand pans there, throwing
my match back at me from every wall of the box-like compartment. Even
McCord's eyes, in the doorway, were large and round and shining. He
probably thought me crazy. Perhaps I was, a little. I ran the match
along close to the ceiling and came upon a rusty hook a little aport of
the centre.

"There," I said. "Was there anything hanging from this--er--say a
parrot--or something, McCord?" The match burned my fingers and went out.

"What do you mean?" McCord demanded from the doorway. I got myself back
into the comfortable yellow glow of the cabin before I answered, and
then it was a question.

"Do you happen to know anything about this craft's personal history?"

"No. What are you talking about! Why?"

"Well, I do," I offered. "For one thing, she's changed her name. And it
happens this isn't the first time she's--Well, damn it all, fourteen
years ago I helped pick up this whatever-she-is off the Virginia
Capes--in the same sort of condition. The