Page:Burton Stevenson--The marathon mystery.djvu/152

130 can’t imagine why. But anyway, he was half-drunk three-fourths of the time and dead drunk the other fourth. We’d find him layin’ in his berth and we’d yank him out and drop him into a tub of water. He’d sober up quicker ’n any man I ever see, but he was never satisfied unless he had a pint or two inside him. When we tied up at the wharf here, he got awful bad—wanted t’ go ashore right away—fought the captain when he wouldn’t let him. The captain handed him over to a policeman, and he got twenty days on the island.”

I nodded again; so that was why he was so long after Tremaine in putting in an appearance at the Marathon.

“Let’s see the picture,” he added, and looked at it more closely. “That’s the very son-of-a-gun. What’s the matter with him, anyway? Asleep? Drunk more likely.”

“No,” I said, “he’s dead.”

“Dead? Drank hisself to death, hey?”

“No; somebody murdered him.”

“Oh, shucks! What’d anybody want to murder him for? Most likely he was tryin’ to kill somebody else and got a dose of his own medicine.”

“That may be,” I assented; and indeed the suggestion was not without its merits. “We’ve been trying to find out something about him. Can you tell us anything?”

“Not a thing more’n I’ve told you. He was on the bum down there in Barbadoes for sure.”

“Do you think the captain would know anything more?”