As I continued to gaze, a shock went through me; the dimness of sleep and fatigue lifted from my eyes, as fog lifts in the channel; and I beheld with startled clearness the photographic presentment of a crowd of strangers.  “J.  Trent, Master” at the top of the card directed me to a smallish, weazened man, with bushy eyebrows and full white beard, dressed in a frock coat and white trousers; a flower stuck in his button-hole, his bearded chin set forward, his mouth clenched with habitual determination.  There was not much of the sailor in his looks, but plenty of the martinet:  a dry, precise man, who might pass for a preacher in some rigid sect; and whatever he was, not the Captain Trent of San Francisco.  The men, too, were all new to me:  the cook, an unmistakable Chinaman, in his characteristic dress, standing apart on the poop steps.  But perhaps I turned on the whole with the greatest curiosity to the figure labelled “E.  Goddedaal, 1st off.”  He whom I had never seen, he might be the identical; he might be the clue and spring of all this mystery; and I scanned his features with the eye of a detective.  He was of great stature, seemingly blonde as a viking, his hair clustering round his head in frowsy curls, and two enormous whiskers, like the tusks of some strange animal, jutting from his cheeks.  With these virile appendages and the defiant attitude in which he stood, the expression of his face only imperfectly harmonised.  It was wild, heroic, and womanish looking; and I felt I was prepared to hear he was a sentimentalist, and to see him weep.

For some while I digested my discovery in private, reflecting how best, and how with most of drama, I might share it with the captain.  Then my sketch-book came in my head; and I fished it out from where it lay, with other miscellaneous possessions, at the foot of my bunk and turned to my sketch of Captain Trent and the survivors of the British brig Flying Scud in the San Francisco bar-room.

“Nares,” said I, “I’ve told you how I first saw Captain Trent in that saloon in ’Frisco? how he came with his men, one of them a Kanaka with a canary-bird in a cage? and how I saw him afterwards at the auction, frightened to death, and as much surprised at how the figures skipped up as anybody there?  Well,” said I, “there’s the man I saw”—­and I laid the sketch before him—­“there’s Trent of ’Frisco and there are his three hands.  Find one of them in the photograph, and I’ll be obliged.”

Nares compared the two in silence.  “Well,” he said at last, “I call this rather a relief:  seems to clear the horizon.  We might have guessed at something of the kind from the double ration of chests that figured.”

“Does it explain anything?” I asked.

“It would explain everything,” Nares replied, “but for the steam-crusher.  It’ll all tally as neat as a patent puzzle, if you leave out the way these people bid the wreck up.  And there we come to a stone wall.  But whatever it is, Mr. Dodd, it’s on the crook.”