Captain Coffin looked up from his charts and stared at him, and I, too, stared, waiting in the semi-darkness beyond the lamp’s circle.

“Good Lord!” said Captain Branscome for the third time.  “And it’s Saturday, too!  You’ll excuse me a moment.”

With that he caught up the letter, and made a dart up the wooden staircase, which led straight from a corner of the room through a square hole in the ceiling to his upper chamber.

“Money again!” said Captain Coffin, turning his eyes upon me and blinking.  “Nothing like money!”

He picked up a pair of compasses, spread them out on the paper of figures before him, and looked up again with a sly, silly smile.

“You won’t guess what I’m doing?” he challenged.

“No.”

“I’m studyin’ navigation.  Cap’n Branscome’s larnin’ it to me.  Some people has luck an’ some has heads; an’ with a head on my shoulders same as I had at your age, I’d be Prime Minister an’ Lord Mayor of Lunnon rolled into one, by crum!” He reached across for Captain Branscome’s sextant, and held it between his shaking hands. “He can do it; hundreds o’ men—­thick-headed men in the ord’nary way—­can do it; take a vessel out o’ Falmouth here, as you might say, and hold her ’crost the Atlantic, as you might put it; whip her along for thirty days, we’ll say; an’ then, ’To-morrow, if the wind holds, an’ about six in the mornin’,’ they’ll say, ’there’ll be an island with a two-three palm-trees on a hill an’ a spit o’ sand bearing nor’-by-west.  Bring ’em in line,’ they’ll say, ‘an’ then you may fetch my shaving-water’—­and all the while no more’n ordinary men, same as you and me.  Whereby I allow it must come in time, though my head don’t seem to get no grip on it.”

Captain Coffin stared for a moment at a sheet of paper on which he had been scribbling figures, and passed it over to me, with a sigh.

“There!  What d’you make of it?”

At a glance I saw that nothing could be made of it.  The figures crossed one another, and ran askew; here and there they trailed off into mere illegibility.  In the left-hand bottom corner I saw a 3 set under a 10, and beneath it the result—­17—­underlined, which, as a sum, left much to be desired, whether you took it in addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division.

“And yet,” he went on plaintively, “there’s hundreds can do it—­even ord’nary men.”

He reached out a hand and gripped me by the elbow; and again his brandy-laden breath sickened me as he drew me close.

“S’pose, now, you was to do this for me?  You could, you know.  And there’s money in it—­lashin’s o’ money!”

He winked at me, glanced around the room, and with an indescribable air of slyness dived a hand into his breast-pocket.