The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,10

couldn’t sleep in the cabin with a dead man. And neither of us could face the thought of trying to prepare any food with him lying there just forward of the galley. We finally moved out on deck altogether.

“By Sunday morning—June eighth—I knew it had to be done. I sewed him in what was left of the old stays’l, with the sounding lead at his feet. It was probably an all-time low in funerals. I couldn’t think of more than a half dozen words of the sea-burial service, and there was no Bible aboard. We did shave and put on shirts, and that was about it. We buried him at one p.m. The position’s in the log, and I think it’s fairly accurate. The weather improved that night, and we came on here and arrived on the sixteenth. Along with the report, I turned his personal belongings over to the marshal’s office. But I don’t understand why they couldn’t locate some of his family; his address is right there—1426 Roland Avenue, San Francisco.”

“Unfortunately,” Soames replied, “there is no Roland Avenue in San Francisco.”

“Oh,” I said.

“So we hoped you might be able to help us.”

I frowned, feeling vaguely uneasy. For some reason I was standing at the rail again on that day of oily calm and blistering tropic sun, watching the body in its Orlon shroud as it sank beneath the surface and began its long slide into the abyss. “That’s just great,” I said. “I don’t know anything about him either.”

“In four days, he must have told you something about himself.”

“You could repeat it all in forty seconds. He told me he was an American citizen. His home was in California. He’d come down to the Canal Zone on some job that had folded up after a couple of months, and he’d like to save the plane fare back to the States by sailing up with me.”

“He didn’t mention the name of any firm, or government agency?”

“Not a word. I gathered it was a clerical or executive job of some kind, because he had the appearance. And his hands were soft.”

“He never said anything about a wife? Children? Brothers?”

“Nothing.”

“Did he say anything at all during the heart attack?”

“No. He seemed to be trying to, but he couldn’t get his breath. And the pain was pretty terrible until he finally lost consciousness.”

‘I see.” Soames’ blue eyes were thoughtful. “Would you describe him?”

I’d say he was around fifty. About my height, six-one. but very slender; I doubt he weighed over a hundred and seventy. Brown eyes, short brown hair with a good deal of gray in it, especially around the temples, but not thinning or receding to any extent. Thin face, rather high forehead, good nose and bone structure, very quiet, and soft-spoken—when he said anything at all. In a movie you’d cast him as a doctor or lawyer or the head of the English department. That’s the thing, you see; he wasn’t hard-nosed or rude about not talking about himself; he was just reserved. He minded his own business, and seemed to expect you to mind yours. And since he was apparently down on his luck, it seemed a little on the tasteless side to go prying into matters he didn’t want to talk about.”

“What about his speech?”

“Well, the outstanding thing about it was that there was damned little of it. But he was obviously well educated. And if there was any trace of a regional accent, I didn’t hear it.”

“Was there anything foreign about it at all? I don’t mean low comedy or vaudeville, but any hesitancy, or awkwardness of phrasing?”

“No,” I said. “It was American.”

“I see.” Soames tapped meditatively on the desk with the eraser end of a pencil. “Now, you say he was an experienced sailor. But he had no papers, and you don’t think he’d ever been a merchant seaman, so you must have wondered about it. Could you make any guess as to where he’d picked up this knowledge of the sea?”

“Yes. I think definitely he’d owned and sailed boats of his own, probably boats in the offshore cruising and ocean-racing class. Actually, a merchant seaman wouldn’t have known a lot of the things Baxter did, unless he was over seventy and had been to sea under sail. Keefer was a good example. He was a qualified A.B.; he knew routine seamanship and how to splice and handle line, and if you gave him a compass course he could steer it. But if you were going