ents these men addressed the white-haired man as Commodore. A navy
captain, I thought, promoted on retirement. His talk bore it out.

"Yes, sirree," he said, as he thumped the table mildly. "A good, tight
merchant ship, with nothing wrong except what might be ascribed to
neglect such as light canvas blown away and ropes cast off the pins,
with no signs of fire, leak, or conflict to drive the crew out, with
plenty of grub in the stores and plenty of water in the tanks. Yet,
there she was, under topsails and topgallant-sails, rolling along
before a Biscay sea, and deserted, except that the deck was almost
covered with dead rats."

"What killed them, Commodore," asked one; "and what happened to the
crew?"

"Nobody knows. It might have been a poisonous gas from the cargo, but
if so it didn't affect us after we boarded her. The log-book was gone,
so we got no information from that. Moreover, every boat was in its
chocks or under its own davits. It was as though some mysterious power
had come down from above and wiped out the crew, besides killing the
rats in the hold. She was a grain ship from 'Frisco, and grain ships
are full of rats.

"I was the prize-lieutenant that took her into Queenstown. She was
condemned in Admiralty proceedings and, later, restored to her owners.
But to this day no man has told the story of that voyage. It is thirty
years and more since then, but it will remain one of the unexplained
mysteries of the sea."

The party left the table a little later, and left me, an ex-sailor, in
a condition of mind not due to the story I had heard from the
Commodore. There was something else roused into activity--something
indefinite, intangible, elusive, like the sense of recognition that
comes to you when you view a new scene that you know you have never
seen before. It was nothing pertaining to myself or my adventures; and
I had never heard of a ship being found deserted with all boats in
place. It was something I must have heard at some time and place that
bore no relation to the sea and its mysteries. It tormented me; I
worried myself into insomnia that night, thinking about it, but at last
fell asleep, and awakened in the morning with a memory twenty-five
years old.

It is a long stretch of time and space from that gilded restaurant of
that night to the arid plans of Arizona, and back through the years of
work and struggle and development to the condition of a sailor on shore
beating his way, horseback a