ed, but he did not return that night or
the next day. Three days later his body was found in a drift of
snow, halfway down a cliff to the west of the town. The right leg
and arm were broken and two ribs on the same side."

I asked: "Who was the man that brought the message?" Melhuish said:
"My sister could not tell, except that he was a stranger.
She supposed he belonged to one of two ships that had arrived in
harbour the day before. She saw nothing of his face to remember; his
jacket-collar being turned up against the snow, and the flaps of his
fur cap pulled down over his ears."

I asked: "Did the man's chest tell nothing when you came to examine
it?" Melhuish said: "Nothing at all. It was full of new clothes,
and very good clothes; but they had no mark upon them, and, besides
the clothes, there was not so much as a scrap of paper."

He went on: "About two weeks later there called a clerk from the
factory to claim the chest, the firm having acted as Mr. Shand's
agents. He was a foreign-looking man, and older than most of the
clerks employed by Davis and Atchison--which was the firm's name.
He gave his own name as Martin. He had been sent over from Carbonear
about ten days before to teach the factory a new way of treating
seal-pelts by means of chemicals. We learnt afterwards that he
earned good wages. He had brought two hands from the factory to
carry the chest, which we gave up to him as soon as he presented a
letter from Mr. Hughes, the firm's chief agent. He said: 'Is this
all you have?' And we said, 'Yes.' We Kept quiet about the map,
which we had examined, but could not make head nor tail of it.
He went away with the chest, and we heard no more of the matter.
The winter closing in, I took service in the factory. I used to run
against this Martin almost every day, but being my superior he never
got beyond nodding to me.

"So it went on, that winter. The next spring I sailed with the
salting fleet as usual. I was mate by this time, and had learned to
navigate. I came back, to find Martin seated in the parlour and
talking, and my mother told me he had asked my sister to marry him.
They had met at the factory and fixed it up between them.
He appeared to be very fond of my sister, who was usually reckoned a
plain-featured woman, and there couldn't be a doubt she was fond of
him. Later on, I heard that she had told him all about the chart,
but had not shown it to him, being afraid to do so without