When Ferdinand King arrived he found Utterbourne absorbed in a sheet of paper before him, upon which he was engaged with a pencil. The caller hesitated a moment, half glancing about for an office boy; but almost at once his presence was perceived, and, flinging down his pencil with a tiny gesture, the Captain rose and held out a hand.
“Come in, please,” he said in a quaint sing-song, his lips parting with a smile which might be called almost insolent were one not at the same time conflictingly sure that the emotion behind it was wholly amiable. “Have a chair. We’re not very sumptuous, since our business doesn’t call for much style.”
When one came into the presence of Captain Utterbourne one seemed coming into the presence of a man about whom strange currents eddied. He wasn’t wholly reassuring—in fact, no one standing before him could feel quite easy or as though his soul was his own. Still, this aura about him had a haunting and insidious attraction, too, so that even though it might prove fatal, one would not care altogether to escape.
King was a little startled to observe that the sheet of paper on which the other had been so diligently at work was covered merely with a lot of scrawled anchors, which the Captain had depicted in a variety of positions: now upright, as though in the act of being lowered, with the stock horizontal and the shank standing perpendicular; again in a position of repose, with the stock and one fluke resting, one assumed, on the bed to the sea. Whenever Utterbourne grew absorbed in anchors it was plain to those who knew him as well as it is ever possible to know a man with a poker face, that he was concentrating on some new enterprise.
The Captain, half sheepishly noticing that his handiwork had been detected, muttered: “No doubt every one has his own unconscious emblem—a stray out of the past, perhaps—h’m?” His lips moved with apparent reluctance, as though it annoyed him to think that nobody, even after all these centuries of progress, had been able to render speech possible without visible effort. He tilted back in his chair somewhat rigidly, his toes just touching the floor as he rocked, and hummed Macdowell’s _To a Wild Rose_ a moment in a mood of vaguely pleasureable detachment. At length, however, there was a reviving “_Well, now_,” and King leaned a little toward him, prepared to hear unfolded the mysterious substance which had seemed hovering in the air last evening. What was going forward behind that card-player’s mask?