I knew that the late Mr. Mumford had been a noble soul who wore full face lambrequins and was fussy about his food.  From the picture Mrs. Mumford showed Vee and me, I judged he must have looked like an upstate banker; but come to get down to cases, she admits he was in the coal and lumber business over in Montclair, New Jersey.

About J. Dudley Simms I dug up all kinds of information.  He’d been brought up by an old uncle who’d made a million or so runnin’ an ale brewery and who had a merry little dream that he was educatin’ J. Dudley to be a minister.  If he’d lasted a couple of years longer, too, it would have been the Rev. J. Dudley Simms for a fact; but when uncle cashed in, Dudley left the divinity school abrupt and forgot ever to go back.

I even discovered that Professor Leonidas Barr, the fish expert and Old Hickory’s cribbage partner, had once worked in a shoe store and could still guess the size of a young lady’s foot by lookin’ at her hands.  But when it came to collectin’ any new dope about Captain Killam, he’s still Rupert the Mysterious.

Durin’ them long days when we went churnin’ steady and monotonous down towards the hook end of Florida, with nothin’ happenin’ but sleep and meals, ’most everybody sort of drifted together and got folksy.  Not Rupert, though.  He don’t forget for a minute that he’s conductin’ a dark and desperate hunt for pirate gold, and he don’t seem contented unless he’s workin’ at it every hour of the day.

Course, after he’s pulled that break of tacklin’ J. Dudley for a mutiny plotter, Old Hickory shuts down on his sleuthin’ around the decks, so he takes it out in gazin’ suspicious at the horizon through a pair of field glasses he always wears strapped to him.  Don’t seem to cheer him up any, either, to have me ask him frivolous questions.

“Can you spot any movie shows or hot-dog wagons out there, Cap’n?” I asks.

He just glares peevish and declines to answer.

“What you lookin’ for, anyway?” I goes on.

“Nothing I care to discuss with you, I think,” says he.

“Bing-g-g,” says I.  “Right on the wrist!”

And then all of a sudden Mrs. Mumford gets hipped with the idea that Rupert is sort of bein’ neglected.  Well, trust her.  She’s been a sunshine worker and a social uplifter all her life.  And no sooner does she get sympathizin’ with Rupert than she starts plannin’ ways of chirkin’ him up.

“The poor dear Captain!” she gurgles gushy.  “He seems so lonely and sad.  Who knows what his past has been, how many dangers he has faced, what ordeals he has been through?  If someone could only get him to talk about them, it might help.”

“Why not tackle him, then?” says I.  “Nobody could do it better than you.”

“Oh, really now!” protests Mrs. Mumford, duckin’ her chin kittenish.  “I—­I couldn’t do it alone.  Perhaps, though, if you young people would—­”