“And you like the voyages long?  I begin to see, sir.  Just as they’re getting near to where the treasure ain’t, a little accident like the loss of their water-supply sends them into port and out again to start hunting all over.”

The Ancient Mariner nodded, and his sun-washed eyes twinkled.

“There was the Emma Louisa.  I kept her on the long voyage over eighteen months with water accidents and similar accidents.  And, besides, they kept me in one of the best hotels in New Orleans for over four months before the voyage began, and advanced to me handsomely, yes, bravely, handsomely.”

“But tell me more, sir; I am most interested,” Dag Daughtry concluded his simple matter of the beer.  “It’s a good game.  I might learn it for my old age, though I give you my word, sir, I won’t butt in on your game.  I wouldn’t tackle it until you are gone, sir, good game that it is.”

“First of all, you must pick out men with money—­with plenty of money, so that any loss will not hurt them.  Also, they are easier to interest—­”

“Because they are more hoggish,” the steward interrupted.  “The more money they’ve got the more they want.”

“Precisely,” the Ancient Mariner continued.  “And, at least, they are repaid.  Such sea-voyages are excellent for their health.  After all, I do them neither hurt nor harm, but only good, and add to their health.”

“But them scars—­that gouge out of your face—­all them fingers missing on your hand?  You never got them in the fight in the longboat when the bo’s’n carved you up.  Then where in Sam Hill did you get the them?  Wait a minute, sir.  Let me fill your glass first.”  And with a fresh-brimmed glass, Charles Stough Greanleaf narrated the history of his scars.

“First, you must know, steward, that I am—­well, a gentleman.  My name has its place in the pages of the history of the United States, even back before the time when they were the United States.  I graduated second in my class in a university that it is not necessary to name.  For that matter, the name I am known by is not my name.  I carefully compounded it out of names of other families.  I have had misfortunes.  I trod the quarter-deck when I was a young man, though never the deck of the Wide Awake, which is the ship of my fancy—­and of my livelihood in these latter days.

“The scars you asked about, and the missing fingers?  Thus it chanced.  It was the morning, at late getting-up times in a Pullman, when the accident happened.  The car being crowded, I had been forced to accept an upper berth.  It was only the other day.  A few years ago.  I was an old man then.  We were coming up from Florida.  It was a collision on a high trestle.  The train crumpled up, and some of the cars fell over sideways and fell off, ninety feet into the bottom of a dry creek.  It was dry, though there was a pool of water just ten feet in diameter and eighteen inches deep.  All the rest was dry boulders, and I bull’s-eyed that pool.