On entering I found an intruder in the person of Harding, the seaman who had been told off as the keeper of the Mysterious Man. He did not notice my approach, for I had on a pair of tennis shoes with rubber soles, therefore I stood in the doorway for a few moments watching him.
He had spread open that document with the seven signatures that had so puzzled me, and with paper and pencil seemed to be scribbling some notes as to its purport. Strange, I thought, that a common seaman could decipher those ill-written lines of Latin where I had so entirely failed. So I watched and saw how, with his head bent to the open port-hole in order to obtain a good light, he was carefully deciphering the words contained there, and I detected by the expression on his countenance that what he found entirely satisfied him. Upon the small piece of paper in his palm he scribbled something now and then, and was just slipping it into his pocket, when I asked in a hard voice:—
He turned with a start, his face flushed in confusion, and stammered:—
“Nothing, doctor. I—I was only looking at this old parchment you got out of Noah’s Ark.”
“You’ve been reading it,” I said. “I’ve watched you making some extracts from it. Give me that paper.”
He made a movement to place it in his pocket, but at the same moment I snatched the old document from his other hand and arrested his effort to conceal the scrap of paper.
“You have no right here,” I said angrily, “and I demand that paper whereon you have made notes of an affair that does not concern you.”
“I shall not give it you,” he responded defiantly.
“You can do so if you wish. I shall be paid off to-day, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Give it to me,” I cried, incensed at the fellow’s insolence, and made a swift movement to seize his wrist. He was, however, too quick for me, for, grasping my arm with his left hand, he screwed up the paper with his right and dropped it through the porthole into the sea.
I saw it flutter for a moment in the air and drop into the surging water ten yards away.
“Leave this place at once,” I commanded. “You have no right here, and have evidently entered for some dishonest purpose. I shall inform Captain Seal at once.”
“All right,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders as he went through the doorway, “you needn’t get your wool off, doctor. I was doing no harm, surely, having a look at that old scribble.”