“Eh?  It’s Brooks—­the boy Brooks!  Glad to see you, Brooks!  Come inside.”

“Thank you, sir,” said I, feeling a strong impulse to bolt as he shook me by the hand, so hot was his and so dry, and so feverishly it gripped me.

“You’re sure no one tracked ye here?” he asked, as he closed the door behind us.

“There was a barber, sir, at the head of the passage.  I stopped to ask him the way.”

“He’s all right, or would be but for that cursed bird of his.  How a man can keep such a bird—­” Captain Coffin broke off.  “I had a two-three nails in my mouth when you knocked.  Nearly made me swallow ’em, you did.  They was copper nails, too.”

I suppose I must have stared at this, for he paused and peered at me, drawing me over to the window, through which—­so thickly grimed it was—­a very little light dribbled from the courtyard into the room.  Yet the room itself was clean, almost spick and span, with a seaman-like tidiness in all its arrangements—­a small room, crowded with foreign odds-and-ends, among which I remember a walking-stick even more singular than the one Captain Coffin carried on his walks abroad (it was white in colour, with lines of small grey indentations, and he afterwards told me it was a shark’s backbone); a corner-cupboard, too, painted over with green-and-yellow tulips.

“Copper nails, I tell you.  Nothing but the best’ll do for your friend Coffin.”  He leaned back, still eyeing me, and tapped me twice on the chest.  “You heard me say that?  ‘Your friend’ was my words.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But you made me jump, you did—­me being that way given when off the liquor.”  He hesitated a moment, with a glance over his shoulder at the tulip-painted cupboard.  “Brooks,” he went on earnestly, “you and me being met on a matter of business, and the same needin’ steadiness—­head and hand, my boy, if ever business did—­what d’ye say to a tot of rum apiece?”

Without waiting for my answer, he hobbled off to the cupboard, and had set two glasses on the table and brimmed them with neat spirit before I had finished protesting.  The bottle-neck trembled on the rims of the glasses and struck out a sort of chime as he paused.

“You won’t?” he asked, gulping down his own portion; and the liquor must have been potent, for it brought a sudden water to his eyes.  “Well, so be it—­if you’ve kept off it at your age.  But at mine”—­ he drank off the second glassful and wiped his mouth—­“I’ve had experiences, Brooks.  When you’ve heard ’em, you wouldn’t be surprised, not if it took a dozen to steady me.”

He filled again, and came close to me, holding the glass, yet so tremulously that the rum spilled over his fingers.