smart run across the ocean, and I should like to carry on and go ahead
with this affair of yours, and make a run slick through it. Shall I try?
Will you hand it over to me?"

They were both delighted to do so, and thanked him heartily.

"Good," said the captain, taking out his watch. "This is half-past eight
a.m., Friday morning. I'll jot that down, and we'll compute how many
hours we've been out when we run into your mother's post-office. There!
The entry's made, and now we go ahead."

They went ahead so well that before the Barnstaple lawyer's office was
open next morning, the captain was sitting whistling on the step of the
door, waiting for the clerk to come down the street with his key and open
it. But instead of the clerk there came the master, with whom the
captain fraternised on the spot to an extent that utterly confounded him.

As he personally knew both Hugh and Alfred, there was no difficulty in
obtaining immediate access to such of the father's papers as were in his
keeping. These were chiefly old letters and cash accounts; from which
the captain, with a shrewdness and despatch that left the lawyer far
behind, established with perfect clearness, by noon, the following
particulars:--

That one Lawrence Clissold had borrowed of the deceased, at a time when
he was a thriving young tradesman in the town of Barnstaple, the sum of
five hundred pounds. That he had borrowed it on the written statement
that it was to be laid out in furtherance of a speculation which he
expected would raise him to independence; he being, at the time of
writing that letter, no more than a clerk in the house of Dringworth