“Not till we try our hand at translatin’ him. I wish I had a Chinese dictionary. Say, Cap’n Mike, you’re as welcome as the flowers in spring, but as soon as you set foot on my farm things begin to happen. Trouble is a step-brother of yours. It’s like harborin’ a stormy petrel.” “’Tis not fair to blackguard me,” laughed O’Shea. “You and your neighbors can sleep easy in your beds for I have caught the bogie-man.” “I wish I knew what it is you’ve caught,” sighed the engineer. O’Shea bent over the sleeping man in order to raise his head and slip underneath it a rolled blanket to serve as a pillow. His fingers chanced to detect on the top of the skull a curious depression or groove over which the red hair was rumpled in a sort of cow-lick. Examination convinced him that this was the result of some violent blow which had fairly dented the bony structure and pressed it down upon the brain. “That is where he got it,” said O’Shea. “And ’tis what made a lunatic of him.” “It looks like they tried to kill him with an axe but he was too tough for ’em, Cap’n Mike. No wonder that crack you gave him over the ear didn’t bother him much.” “And whoever it was that put their mark on his back was the same party who caved in his lid or I’m a liar,” was the conclusion of Michael O’Shea. II The only inmate of the cottage who slept soundly was the vagabond in the wood-shed. His guardians stood watch and watch as a matter of habit, but the early morning found them both astir and drinking mugs of coffee very hot and strong. Their guest had not moved from his outstretched position on the mattress. He slumbered like a man drugged or utterly exhausted. O’Shea had spread a blanket over his naked back and shoulders partly for warmth, but another motive also prompted him. He wished to hide the cruel disfigurement. It seemed unfeeling to expose it. Now by daylight he moved on tiptoe to the mattress and twitched the blanket aside. O’Shea had lived among hard men and fought his way through battering circumstances in which physical brutality still survived to uphold the rude old traditions of the sea. But this sight made him wince and shiver, and he did not like to look at it. Covering it with the blanket he fell to wondering, with an intensity of interest that gripped him more and more strongly, what tragedy was concealed behind the curtain of this luckless man’s past.