Part 21 (1/2)

”Professor! ye sartainly give me a start. By the e-tar-nal snakes! I could have taken my dying oath you wasn't north o' the cape o' the Virgins. What you doin' yere in Maria Debora's?”

It began to be impressed on my mind with force that I was a good deal like the little old woman of the nursery rhyme. I wondered whether this was really me, or was it not me? My ident.i.ty as Clinton Webb had been denied at the consul's, and here a perfect stranger was calling me out of my name--and he seemed insistent upon it, too!

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH I GET ACQUAINTED WITH CAPTAIN ADONIRAM TUGG

The face I finally saw at the top of that beanpole figure was as long as the moral law. Such a lank, cadaverous visage I don't think I had ever seen before. The man was a human lath.

And so bronzed and toughened was his hide that he looked to be made out of sole-leather. His mouth was a grim, post-box slit; his nose was a high beak with such a hump on it that I thought it had been broken; but his eyes were human--gray-blue, twinkling with innumerable humorous wrinkles at the outer corners.

”By the e-tar-nal snakes!” he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed when I had tipped back my head so that he could really see my face. ”You ain't the Professor at all!

Why, you're a boy!”

”I am not your friend, the Professor,” I admitted.

”And the voice!” he muttered, staring down at me. ”It's his voice. I ain't put in my winters with him this last dozen years and more to be mistook in his voice. Say, boy, who be you?”

”Clint Webb is my name,” I replied.

”Where do you hail from?”

”Ma.s.sachusetts. Late of the Scarboro whaling bark.”

”How old be you?”

”Going on seventeen.”

”Well,” he puffed, with a windy sigh, ”you look behind enough like the Professor to be him. And your voice is jest like his--that I'll swear to! You must be some related.”

”I don't know that we've any scientists in the family,” I said, with a laugh. I rather liked the long-legged individual.

”Don't know n.o.body named Vose?” he asked.

”No-o. Don't think I do.”

He slumped down upon the bench beside me and helped himself to beans.

”By the e-tar-nal snakes!” he muttered. ”It does completely flabergasticate me--I do a.s.sure you! I never saw two folks so near alike, back-to! You'd oughter see the Professor.”

”I would be only too happy,” I said, politely.

I was interested in my new acquaintance, but not particularly in his friend whom I appeared to favor. He told me in the course of the meal a good deal about himself; and it was interesting, his story.

He was called Captain Adoniram Tugg, a Connecticut Yankee, and skipper of a two-stick schooner called the Sea Spell. He followed an odd business. He was a wild animal trapper, and gathered Natural History specimens of many kinds for museums and menageries. He had just disposed of his last season's catch, had s.h.i.+pped the last specimen northward by steams.h.i.+p, and was about to sail for the Straits of Magellan again, near which he had his headquarters.

”To tell you the truth, the Professor and me are partners. He's an odd stick,” quoth Captain Tugg, after supper, as we sat on the broad step before Maria Debora's door, and he smoked the native cheroots while I listened. ”He ain't been in a civilized town like this since I've knowed him. For a l'arned chap, and a New Englander, he seems to have lost all curiosity, and, I reckon, he's got a grouch on the rest of mankind.”