Didn't you recognize me?"
"Wal, no," said Hervey, his drawl more pronounced than ever. "I
haven't got the memory for faces that you and the Don here seem
to possess. Huh!" He wheeled his chair and faced Braddock
squarely. "I'd have thought you wiser not to back up the Don,
sir."
Braddock's little eyes sparkled.
"I am not afraid of you," said he with great contempt. "I never
did anything for which you could get money out of me for, Captain
Hervey or Gustav Vasa, or whatever your name might be."
"You were always a mighty spry man," assented the skipper coolly,
"but spry men, I take it, make mistakes from being too almighty
smart."
Braddock shrugged his shoulders, and Don Pedro intervened.
"This is all beside the point," he remarked angrily. "Captain
Hervey, do you deny that you are Gustav Vasa in the face of this
evidence?"
Hervey drew up the left sleeve of his reefer jacket, and showed
on his bared wrist the symbol of the sun and the encircling
serpent.
"Is that enough?" he drawled, "or do you want to look at this?"
and he turned his head to reveal his scarred right temple.
"Then you admit that you are Vasa?"
"Wal," drawled the captain again, "that's one of my names, I
guess, though I haven't used it since I traded that blamed mummy
in Paris, thirty years ago.
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