nd were driving away, Winter said to me:

"I'm glad we ran up against Butler. I wanted you to meet him. What did
you think of him?"

"I don't know that I thought very much of him at all," I answered.

"Do you believe in the supernatural?"

"I don't exactly know that I do," I smiled.

"A very queer thing happened to him a year or two ago. You ought to have
him tell you about it."

"What sort of thing?"

Winter did not answer my question.

"I have no explanation of it myself," he said. "But there's no doubt
about the facts. Are you interested in things like that?"

"Things like what?"

"Spells and magic and all that."

"I've never met anyone who wasn't."

Winter paused for a moment.

"I guess I won't tell you myself. You ought to hear it from his own lips
so that you can judge. How are you fixed up for to-night?"

"I've got nothing on at all."

"Well, I'll get hold of him between now and then and see if we can't go
down to his ship."

Winter told me something about him. Captain Butler had spent all his
life on the Pacific. He had been in much better circumstances than he
was now, for he had been first officer and then captain of a
passenger-boat plying along the coast of California, but he had lost his
ship and a number of passengers had been drowned.

"Drink, I guess," said Winter.

Of course there had been an enquiry, which had cost him his certificate,
and then he drifted further afield. For some years he had knocked about
the South Seas, but he was now in command of a small schooner which
sailed between Honolulu and the various islands of the group. It
belonged to a Chinese to whom the fact that his skipper had no
certificate meant only that he could be had for lower wages, and to have
a white man in charge was always an advantage.

And now that I had heard this about him I took the trouble to remember
more exactly what he was like. I recalled his round spectacles and the
round blue eyes behind them, and so gradually reconstructed him before
my mind. He was a little man, without angles, plump, with a round face
like the full moon and a little fat round nose. He had fair short hair,
and he was red-faced and clean shaven. He had plump hands, dimpled on
the knuckles, and short fat legs. He was a jolly soul, and the tragic
experience he had gone through seemed to have left him unscarred. Though
he must have been thirty-four or thirty-five he looked much younger. But
after all I had given him but a