I
Captain Utterbourne was involved with a vague but immensely lucrative
corporation calling itself the Hyde Packet Company. The business was
tramp freighters—vessels of one or two thousand tons, mostly, with
business-like mien, which poked nondescript noses into every corner of
the navigable world where commerce was to be scented. The _Star of Troy_
was Captain Utterbourne’s own cherished and particular tramp: a sturdy
craft with bulging, broad-beamed bow and very decent living quarters—for
the Captain was somewhat particular how he lived. How he happened to be a
sea captain was a supreme enigma. It baffled everybody. There hadn’t been
a grain of salt in the family until now. But that he was a sea captain
had to be accepted as a fact. To tell the truth, that was all you could
hope to do with Utterbourne—simply accept him. There was no alternative.
The Hyde offices (despite the prosperity of the stockholders) were just
one large dusty room, the walls smoky and cluttered with maps; but it
was always a lively place. A good many desks were crowded into it, at
one of which, in a modest corner, sat Captain Utterbourne. Men mostly in
shirt sleeves kept up a busy drone, abetted by intelligent-looking girls
deep in dictation and the clatter of typing. The Captain, however, sat
unheeding in the midst of everything.
When Ferdinand King arrived he found Utterbourne absorbed in a sheet of
paper before him, upon which he was engaged with a pencil. The caller
hesitated a moment, half glancing about for an office boy; but almost at
once his presence was perceived, and, flinging down his pencil with a
tiny gesture, the Captain rose and held out a hand.
“Come in, please,” he said in a quaint sing-song, his lips parting with a
smile which might be called almost insolent were one not at the same time
conflictingly sure that the emotion behind it was wholly amiable. “Have a
chair. We’re not very sumptuous, since our business doesn’t call for much
style.”
When one came into the presence of Captain Utterbourne one seemed coming
into the presence of a man about whom strange currents eddied. He wasn’t
wholly reassuring—in fact, no one standing before him could feel quite
easy or as though his soul was his own. Still, this aura about him had
a haunting and insidious attraction, too, so that even though it might
prove fatal, one would not care altogether to escape.
King was a little startled to observe that the sheet of paper on which
the other had been so diligently at work was covered merely with a lot
of scrawled anchors, which the Captain had depicted in a variety of
positions: now upright, as though in the act of being lowered, with
the stock horizontal and the shank standing perpendicular; again in a
position of repose, with the stock and one fluke resting, one assumed, on
the bed to the sea. Whenever Utterbourne grew absorbed in anchors it was
plain to those who knew him as well as it is ever possible to know a man
with a poker face, that he was concentrating on some new enterprise.
The Captain, half sheepishly noticing that his handiwork had been
detected, muttered: “No doubt every one has his own unconscious emblem—a
stray out of the past, perhaps—h’m?” His lips moved with apparent
reluctance, as though it annoyed him to think that nobody, even after
all these centuries of progress, had been able to render speech possible
without visible effort. He tilted back in his chair somewhat rigidly,
his toes just touching the floor as he rocked, and hummed Macdowell’s
_To a Wild Rose_ a moment in a mood of vaguely pleasureable detachment.
At length, however, there was a reviving “_Well, now_,” and King leaned
a little toward him, prepared to hear unfolded the mysterious substance
which had seemed hovering in the air last evening. What was going forward
behind that card-player’s mask?