about a ship, but I don't know much else, and certainly nothing else thoroughly, so to speak. But I have seen other things in my time, for all that, just as any one who travels is bound to see things, and, just as any one else that travels, I have remembered a few things outside my business, just a few; the rest I've forgotten. Now you're different from that, for you're a scholar and have travelled widely, too, and a man who can use his book knowledge with what he comes in contact with in the world is the sort of man who might perhaps explain what's bothering me at the present moment, for I am dense; you are not."
"What is bothering you. Captain? Of course something to do with these murders that are uppermost in our minds?"
"Something, I dare say," replied the captain slowly, weighing his every word, "but, on the other hand, maybe it's nothing. I can't connect the two things myself, and yet I've a feeling that I ought to be able to. I've tried, though, tried hard, been trying all through breakfast, and it worries me, because, as a man of action, thinking always does worry me sorely. You may laugh at what I am going to tell you; if you do I shan't take offence, because it's precisely what I should have done had any one told me about what I'm going to tell you, something that"—the captain hesitated, speaking as if he longed to keep silent; speaking as if afraid of being disbelieved—"something—well, I'll tell
