Standing well back in the hall Mermaid had heard this extraordinary conversation. Now she slipped into[79] the front parlour ahead of Miss Smiley, who stood, apparently forgetful or stunned, for two or three minutes in the open doorway. Then she closed the door with a bang, entered the front parlour, and went through it into the living room. She stood before the stove a moment, warming her hands. Her face was working and her mouth was twisting, but her lips remained closed. Mermaid looked at her with deep sympathy and with a certain terror at the memory of what she had just heard. Neither emotion drowned the awful curiosity within the girl to know what it had all been about. But she dared not ask questions.

In silence the two got their supper, in silence they ate it. Once Keturah Smiley sighed, once she spoke, but only to say: “Thank the Lord, John will be coming over to-morrow!”

Mermaid, who had been looking forward to this visit of her Dad, thinking he might give her a scooter ride on the smoothly frozen bay, said: “How rich do you suppose Cap’n Vanton is, Miss Smiley?”

Keturah looked at her absently.

“Not rich enough to buy an easy conscience, probably,” she replied, drily. Mermaid hesitated, and then took her courage in both hands.

“Miss Smiley, I heard some of what he said. I—I guess I heard most of it,” she said.

Keturah showed neither surprise nor anger. She looked at Mermaid attentively and there was a flicker of[80] interest in her eyes as she asked: “Well, and what did you make of it?”

“He said he’d killed a Captain King!” the girl blurted out. “How could he do that and not be in jail for it?”

“Maybe he has been,” Keturah suggested.

“But then how could he be so rich?” persisted Mermaid.

“Maybe it isn’t his money,” Miss Smiley replied.

“It seems to be now.” Mermaid rested on the fact, solidly buttressed by all appearances.

“So it does,” agreed the woman.

But she was at some pains, the next day, to talk to her brother only after Mermaid had had her scooter ride and had gone out to do errands at the store.

“When he first spoke of ‘a man named King,’” Keturah explained to John Smiley, “I couldn’t make the connection. Then I remembered the entry about the flogging in Uncle John’s log of that passage. Aunt Keturah was with him on that voyage. The log only says that the mate refused to obey orders. I never heard Aunt Keturah utter a word of such a thing, but it’s perfectly possible; more than that, it’s likely. Mates, first mates, weren’t flogged before the crew for insubordination. There was something personal, I suspect. As for his—this fellow’s—having killed King, that’s neither here nor there with us. He said King had done us all the harm he ever would, but what harm did he ever do? Uncle John and Aunt Keturah lived to a[81] peaceful old age and died comfortably in their beds—leastways, I suppose they were as comfortable as a person can be dying.”

But the “Captain King” struck a full chord of memory in John Smiley’s breast.

“Don’t you remember?” he cried. “That miserable devil we found on the beach after the wreck of the Mermaid, one of the crew? Remember I told you I sat up all night with him and that I made out from his delirious talking that a ‘Captain King’ had had the little girl, and had been sending her back to someone? He wanted to keep himself out of it and he wanted ‘forgiveness’—at any rate, that was one word in the letter we found in the pocket of the Mermaid’s skipper.” He was deep in the painful process of recollection. “But still I can’t make head nor tail of it,” he confessed. “This man King may have hated John Hawkins and been willing to do anything he could to hurt him, he may have hated Aunt Keturah, but they’re dead and that’s an end of them! As for his harming us, he never could have had a chance. And as he’s dead he’ll never get one. And that’s an end of him! Captain Vanton says he killed him, and probably if he did it was a good job. He must have thought that King had bothered us somehow. Thoughtful of him to come and assure us that the dirty dog’s dead. I suppose,” he continued, reflectively, “I might go see him and talk with him. Perhaps he may have learned something from King that[82] will set us on the track of Mermaid’s people. I’ll go!”

Keturah was inclined to dissuade him.

“He thinks,” she said, with her usual shrewdness, “that we know something we don’t know, and that he does know. Or else,” she wavered, “he’s after something, and if we go after him we’ll be playing right into his hands. I don’t know——” She came to a dead stop for a moment, and a rare look of uncertainty, almost of ............