A fortune-teller was consulted, and put into a magnetic sleep, and, if the description they had painted of the man they were after could be depended on by her, they would find him, under another name, in a national ship on the East India station.
Here the Colonel began rubbing his hands again.
It appeared, moreover, that Taylor and Greenleaf had met more than once, and consulted together, and made two or three attempts to charter a vessel; but, being poor and among strangers, and afraid of trusting to other people--no matter why--they finally agreed to lie by till they were better off, and not be seen together till they should be able to undertake the enterprise without help from anybody.
"But," said Greenleaf. "I am tired of waiting. He may be dead for all I know He was an old man. At any rate, he is beyond my reach, out of hail; and so, d'ye see, if you'll rig us out a small schooner, of not more than seventy-five or eighty tons, I will go with you, and ask for no wages; and here's the landlord'll go, too, on the same lay; and, if you'll give me a third of what we find, I'll answer for Taylor, dead or alive, and you shall be welcome to the rest, and may do what you like with it."
And all these facts being communicated to some of our people, and agreed to, a small schooner was chartered--the Napoleon, of ninety tons; Captain John Sawyer was put in master, and Watts, who had followed the sea forty years, and is now the keeper of Portland light, supercargo.
Not less than five, and it may be six, different voyages followed, one after the other, as fast as a vessel could be engaged and a crew got together; and, though nothing was "_realized_" but vexation, disappointment, and self-reproach, till the parties who had ventured upon the undertaking were almost ashamed to show their faces, there is not one of the whole to this hour, I verily believe, who does not stick to the faith and swear _it_ was no _bubble_; and they are men of character and experience--men of business habits, cool and cautious in their calculations, and by no means given to chasing will-o'-the-wisps anywhere.
And now let me give the particulars that have since come to my knowledge, on the authority of those who were actually parties in the strange enterprise from first to last.