The visitor did not say whether it was or was not. He looked around, as he might have on coming on deck, to see whether the mate was doing his work properly. Richard Hand lugged a chair forward, but Captain Vanton gave no sign that he noticed this. He spoke a few words in his best quarterdeck voice: “When did you last hear from Captain King?” The effect on Richard Hand was curious. For a moment his weak and vicious jaw dropped. A look of immense distrust invaded his crafty eyes. Then he seemed to recover himself. Rubbing his hands, as if they were cold, as they doubtless were, Mr. Hand eyed his questioner up and down a moment and then gave question for question: “Have you a letter from him?” Captain Vanton, who had not hitherto looked at the village miser at all, now turned and gazed squarely at him, and with so cold and glittering and truculent an eye that Mr. Hand seemed to become more shrunken than ever. “No,” Captain Vanton told him. Then he asked, “Have you?” The village miser shuffled and cleared his throat. He mumbled something, a negative apparently. There was a moment’s silence which was broken by the Captain, whose tone had a chilled steel edge. “Why don’t you answer my question, sir?” It was not the polite “sir” of the land but the formal, and often positively insulting, “sir” of the sea. Mr. Hand had never been so set down in his life. There was never much starch in him, and what there was went out completely. “I--I heard from him--why, quite recently, less than a month ago, in fact,” he explained not very readily. “But you--you have later news of him, I can see that.” The Uriah Heep in the man came to the surface and old Mr. Hand exhibited his favourite brand of cordiality--the oily voice and the skimped smile. “Yes-yes. I hope he is well!” “He is,” affirmed Captain Vanton and added non-committally: “He is dead.” An expression of shocked surprise appeared on the face of the village miser. He made curious, clucking noises. “Dear me. Dear me,” he managed to say, finally, as an inadequate expression of his regret that Captain King was well--and dead. Captain Vanton glared at the opposite wall, resolutely taking no notice of this contemptible land creature. “How did he die?” pursued the much-affected Hand. “Violently,” barked Captain Vanton. The mortgage miser recoiled. When he spoke again his voice was feeble: “I suppose you knew him very well?” The Captain paid no attention to this. Suddenly he turned and looked through Mr. Hand about two inches to the left of the breastbone and in the latitude of the third rib, where Mr. Hand’s heart should have been sighted by the experienced mariner, if the miser had had any. Mr. Hand could not have been more disconcerted if Captain Vanton had pulled a sextant from his pocket and taken an observation with that.