But we had come alongside the catboat, and no one could talk for a little while until we were all arranged in the boat and our man had told Jerry and me to pull a mattressy thing out of the tiny little cabin and had laid Greg on it in the bottom of the boat.  He gave him some stuff out of a little flasky bottle, too, and Greg sputtered over it and said “Ugh!” but afterward he said: 

“It’s nice and hot inside when I thought it had gone.”

And we couldn’t talk, either, when our man was hoisting the orange-painted sail and hauling up the anchor and running back and forth to pull ropes and things.  But when he was settled at the tiller and all of us were cosy with sweaters and coats, Jerry asked him again.

“Why, you see,” the Bottle Man said, “something had hit me very hard and for a long time all that I was able to do was to totter along on the two sticks.”

“But what hit you?” I asked.

He dropped his voice, because Greg was actually asleep.

“An inconsiderate shell,” he said.

For a minute, because I was so used to thinking of him on the lonely island, I imagined a big conch-shell being hurled at him from somewhere.  Then Jerry and I both gasped: 

“You mean you were in the war?”

“Exactly,” said our man.

“And the bearded man was a doctor?” Jerry asked.

“That he was!” the Bottle Man said.

We both asked him questions at once, but he was dreadfully vague, and kept looking at Greg and the sail and the shore, but we managed to piece together that he’d been wounded twice and left for dead in No-Man’s-Land (after doing all sorts of heroic things, we know) and finally sent home to America from a French hospital.  We found out, too, that his aunt was the “good soul” he talked about in his letters, and that she half-owned the island and had a beautiful big old house on it where she made him come while he convalesced.  It was very hard to find out all these things, because he would be so mysterious and kept saying “Ah!” and “That’s another story!” He also wanted to hear all of our adventures, but we wouldn’t tell him those until we’d heard some of his.

Jerry asked him suddenly about the scar where the sea-thing bit him, or stabbed him, or whatever it did, and our man twinkled and pulled up his sleeve.  And there, just above his right elbow where the tan stopped, was a little white three-cornered scar, sure enough.  Jerry looked and said “Oh!” and our man said “Ah-ha!”

And at the end of all the stories we realized that we didn’t know, even now, how he happened to be sailing along just in time to rescue us.

“I sailed all the way from Bluar Boor,” he said, “on purpose to see you.  To tell the truth, I had designs on the ‘Sea Monster’ which will not be carried out now.  I laid up last night inside the Headland breakwater and made an early start this morning for the last leg of the trip.  I recognized the ‘Sea Monster’ a long way off, but I must say I was surprised when I saw Jerry’s shirt signaling so distressfully.  Of course I knew who you were at once, when you called the place the ‘Sea Monster,’ but Christine did stagger me for a minute.”