Swept Out to Sea Part 21

"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."

"How long did you say you had known him?" I asked, idly.

"All of twelve year. He come to my camp one day. Just walked up to the door like he'd come here and knock. But I didn't suppose there was another white man within five hundred miles--'nless he was aboard some craft beating through the straits.

"He was civil spoken enough; but he never would open up. Most fellows meeting that sort o' way," continued Captain Tugg, puffing reflectively, "would git chummy. The Professor's never told me a thing about himself.

As fur as I know he was born full growed, right there on the rocks where my shanty's built, and ain't got kith nor kin--fam'bly or enemy--just as lonely as Adam was in Eden before the trouble began!

"Yet," said the captain, "to look at the Professor, you'd know there was never nothing crooked about his partner. And I have--but nothing about his past. Only I'm willing to put up real money that whatever happened to Professor Vose was something that was caused by no fault of his. He's always been sad. Never heard him laugh. He's the kindest man ye ever see, son. And if one o' them Injun's sick, or the like, he treats 'em like a sure-'nough hospital sawbones.

"Then he is a physician?" I asked suddenly.

"I reckon he's most anything that a man kin l'arn out o' books,"

declared Captain Tugg. "He sent by me to Buenos Ayres here, first trip I made after we'd gone partners in the animal biz, for the greatest old outfit of drugs and the like you ever see. The natives come flockin' to him for miles an' miles. He's one big medicine man, all right, all right!"

"And I look like him?" I queried.

"By the e-tar-nal snakes! you sartainly favor him, son," declared the captain, enthusiastically. "Why! ye might be his son. Got the same features. The Professor keeps clean shaven. Hair like him, too, now I looks at ye. And your voice--Well! it does beat all how near like him you be. Sure you ain't got no relative named Vose?"

"How do you know his name is Vose?" I asked, my voice trembling a little, for the old mystery of my father's disappearance had swept in upon my soul again and I was shaken to the depths.

"Wal! I swear now! I never thought of that. I s'pose he might never have told me his real name," said Tugg.

The whole story took hold of me as it had when Tom Anderly told me of the man that had been picked up by the coaster, Sally Smith, off Bolderhead Neck some fourteen or fifteen years before. Tom had said nothing about the man looking like me; but of course, Tom didn't know the man long--only until the coaster reached New York City. And his name had been Carver--or so the Unknown had said. This Captain Tugg had been partners with the man he called the Professor for twelve years. Long enough to know his peculiarities and to recognize in my build, and in the tones of my voice, things that reminded him strongly of his partner.

And I had been told, often enough, that I had my father's stature and his very tone of voice and manner of speaking!

But hold on! there was another way to make connection between the flying strands of this seemingly absurd story. I turned to Captain Tugg calmly.

"By the way, sir," I said, "do you ever run around to Santiago?"

"Valparaiso, you mean, son?" he returned. "That's the seaport."

"I mean Santiago, Chili."

"Why, pshaw! I _have_ been to the capital once--three or four years ago."

"What for, sir--if I'm not too curious? You see, I've a reason for asking," I said.

"I reckon so," he returned, eyeing me grimly. "And I've a reason for not telling you. Private business."

"I don't mean to be too 'nosey,'" I returned. "But I'll ask you another question. If it hasn't anything to do with your private business, you'll answer me?"

"Let drive," he commanded, thoughtfully smoking.

"When you were in Santiago three or four years ago----"