llings, he journeyed up the harbour to Jackson Bay,
where lay the lofty-poled, sweet-lined, three-topmast American schooner,
the _Mary Turner_.

Once on board, explaining his errand, he was taken below into the main
cabin, where he interviewed, and was interviewed by, a quartette of men
whom Daughtry qualified to himself as "a rum bunch."

It was because he had talked long with the steward who had left the ship,
that Dag Daughtry recognized and identified each of the four men. That,
surely, was the "Ancient Mariner," sitting back and apart with washed
eyes of such palest blue that they seemed a faded white. Long thin wisps
of silvery, unkempt hair framed his face like an aureole. He was slender
to emaciation, cavernously checked, roll after roll of skin, no longer
encasing flesh or muscle, hanging grotesquely down his neck and swathing
the Adam's apple so that only occasionally, with queer swallowing
motions, did it peep out of the mummy-wrappings of skin and sink back
again from view.

A proper ancient mariner, thought Daughtry. Might be seventy-five, might
just as well be a hundred and five, or a hundred and seventy-five.

Beginning at the right temple, a ghastly scar split the cheek-bone, sank
into the depths of the hollow cheek, notched across the lower jaw, and
plunged to disappearance among the prodigious skin-folds of the neck. The
withered lobes of both ears were perforated by tiny gypsy-like circles of
gold. On the skeleton fingers of his right hand were no less than five
rings--not men's rings, nor women's, but foppish rings--"that would fetch
a price," Daughtry adjudged. On the left hand were no rings, for there
were no fingers to wear them. Only was there a thumb; and, for that
matter, most of the hand was missing as well, as if it had been cut off
by the same slicing edge that had cleaved him from temple to jaw and
heaven alone knew how far down that skin-draped neck.

The Ancient Mariner's washed eyes seemed to bore right through Daughtry
(or at least so Daughtry felt), and rendered him so uncomfortable as to
make him casually step to the side for the matter of a yard. This was
possible, because, a servant seeking a servant's billet, he was expected
to stand and face the four seated ones as if they were judges on the
bench and he the felon in the dock. Nevertheless, the gaze of the
ancient one pursued him, until, studying it more closely, he decided that
it did not reach to him at all. He go