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[38] 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[39] 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?