“Well, yes. He’s been drinking a little, of course; but these boys in college—”
“He very nigh killed the skipper of the _Sylvia Fletcher_, and there’ll be the devil to pay about it. It was just luck there wasn’t murder done before my very eyes. He’s been drinking enough so as to wake a black devil in his heart! Enough so he’s like a roaring bull after the first pretty girl in the offing.”
“There, there, captain!” The doctor tried to soothe him, his thin voice making strange contrast with the captain’s booming bass. “You’re probably exaggerating. A little exuberance may be pardoned in youth,” his expression belied his words. “Remember, captain, when _you_ were—”
“That’s just what’s driving me on the rocks with grief and despair!” the old man burst out, gripping the arms of the rocker. “God above! It’s just the realization of my own youth, flung back at me now, that’s like to kill me! That boy, so help me—why, he’s thrown clean back fifty years all at one crack!”
“He has, I tell you! He’s jumped back half a century. _He_ don’t belong in this age of airplanes and wireless. _He_ belongs back with the clipper-ships and—”
“It’s far from nonsense! There’s a bad strain somewhere in my blood. I’ve been afraid a long time it was going to crop out in Hal. There’s always been a tradition in my family of evil doings now and then. I don’t know anything certain about it, though, except that my grandfather, Amalfi Briggs, died of bursting a blood-vessel in his brain in a fit of rage. That was all that saved him from being a murderer—he died before he could kill the other man!”
Silence came, save for the piping whistle of an urchin far up the road. The ever-rising, falling suspiration of the sea breathed its long caress across the land, on which a vague, pale sheen of starlight was descending.
Suddenly, from abovestairs, sounded a dull, slamming sound as of a bureau-drawer violently shut. Another slam followed; and now came a grumbling of muffled profanity.
“All that saved my grandfather from being a murderer,” said Briggs dourly, “was the fact that he dropped dead himself before he could cut down the other man with the ship-carpenter’s adze he had in his hand.”
“Indeed? Your grandfather must have been rather a hard specimen.”