Page:Doctor Syn - A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh.djvu/164

 went so far as to ask the bo'sun, who has had most dealings with the fellow, whether he had ever touched him."

"Touched him? What do you mean?" asked the parson, who began dimly to see what the other was driving at.

"Touched, touched him," repeated the captain with emphasis. "The bo'sun told me ' No ' and that he wouldn't care about it, for he considered that 'a weird-looking cove'—I'll use his precise way of expressing it—that 'a weird-looking cove with a face like a dead 'un, what never took food nor drink to his knowledge, weren't the sort of cove that a respectable seaman wanted to touch.'"

Jerry looked at the Doctor. He was as white as the snowy tablecloth before him. Yet he still feigned not to quite follow the captain's meaning.

"And now," asked the captain, "mad as it sounds, do you see any connection between the two cases? It's plain to any traveller or reader of travel books that some of these foreign rascals, especially the priests, possess strange, weird gifts that the white man's brain runs short of, and I want to know if you see any connection between the two cases."

Doctor Syn's hand was trembling, so much so that the long clay pipe stem snapped between his finger and thumb. Neither seemed to notice this, though the lighted ashes had fallen out of the bowl upon the