But why was I in the middle of Canada going west, when my grandparents lived in England?  Promptly I created a married sister who lived in California.  She would take care of me.  I developed at length her loving nature.  But they were not done with me, those hard-hearted policemen.  I had joined the Glenmore in England; in the two years that had elapsed before my desertion at Montreal, what had the Glenmore done and where had she been?  And thereat I took those landlubbers around the world with me.  Buffeted by pounding seas and stung with flying spray, they fought a typhoon with me off the coast of Japan.  They loaded and unloaded cargo with me in all the ports of the Seven Seas.  I took them to India, and Rangoon, and China, and had them hammer ice with me around the Horn and at last come to moorings at Montreal.

And then they said to wait a moment, and one policeman went forth into the night while I warmed myself at the stove, all the while racking my brains for the trap they were going to spring on me.

I groaned to myself when I saw him come in the door at the heels of the policeman.  No gypsy prank had thrust those tiny hoops of gold through the ears; no prairie winds had beaten that skin into wrinkled leather; nor had snow-drift and mountain-slope put in his walk that reminiscent roll.  And in those eyes, when they looked at me, I saw the unmistakable sun-wash of the sea.  Here was a theme, alas! with half a dozen policemen to watch me read—­I who had never sailed the China seas, nor been around the Horn, nor looked with my eyes upon India and Rangoon.

I was desperate.  Disaster stalked before me incarnate in the form of that gold-ear-ringed, weather-beaten son of the sea.  Who was he?  What was he?  I must solve him ere he solved me.  I must take a new orientation, or else those wicked policemen would orientate me to a cell, a police court, and more cells.  If he questioned me first, before I knew how much he knew, I was lost.

But did I betray my desperate plight to those lynx-eyed guardians of the public welfare of Winnipeg?  Not I. I met that aged sailorman glad-eyed and beaming, with all the simulated relief at deliverance that a drowning man would display on finding a life-preserver in his last despairing clutch.  Here was a man who understood and who would verify my true story to the faces of those sleuth-hounds who did not understand, or, at least, such was what I endeavored to play-act.  I seized upon him; I volleyed him with questions about himself.  Before my judges I would prove the character of my savior before he saved me.

He was a kindly sailorman—­an “easy mark.”  The policemen grew impatient while I questioned him.  At last one of them told me to shut up.  I shut up; but while I remained shut up, I was busy creating, busy sketching the scenario of the next act.  I had learned enough to go on with.  He was a Frenchman.  He had sailed always on French merchant vessels, with the one exception of a voyage on a “lime-juicer.”  And last of all—­blessed fact!—­he had not been on the sea for twenty years.