“Can’t say,” he answered again. “His face was blacked.” “Didn’t he talk Blue Nose--in the Nova Scotian way?” “Well, he did,” Sadler assented slowly. “But any one could for a disguise. It’s as easy as...” Beside me, the turnkey whispered suddenly, “Pull him up; stop his mouth.” I said, “Wasn’t he an older man? Didn’t he look between forty and fifty?” “What do _you_ look like?” the chief mate asked. “I’m twenty-four,” I answered; “I can prove it.” “Well, you look forty and older,” he answered negligently. “So did he.” His cool, disinterested manner overwhelmed me like the blow of an immense wave; it proved so absolutely that I had parted with all semblance of youth. It was something added to the immense waste of waters between myself and Seraphina; an immense waste of years. I did not ask much of the next witness; Sadler had made me afraid. Septimus Hearn, the master of the _Victoria_, was a man with eyes as blue and as cold as bits of round blue pebble; a little goat’s beard, iron-gray; apple-coloured cheeks, and small gold earrings in his ears. He had an extraordinarily mournful voice, and a retrospective melancholy of manner. He was just such another master of a trader as Captain Lumsden had been, and it was the same story over again, with little different touches, the hard blue eyes gazing far over the top of my head; the gnarled hands moving restlessly on the rim of his hat. “Afterwards the prisoner ordered the steward to give us a drink of brandy. A glass was offered me, but I refused to drink it, and he said, ‘Who is it that refuses to drink a glass of brandy?’ He asked me what countryman I was, and if I was an American.” There were two others from the unfortunate _Victoria_--a Thomas Davis, boatswain, who had had one of Nikola’s pistol-balls in his hip; and a sort of steward--I have forgotten his name--who had a scar of a cutlass wound on his forehead.