CHAPTER XVII
THE AILEEN
So, by haphazard chance, or trick of Fate, were gathered in the port the motley crews that were to embark on that mad voyage, whose perils and strange adventures your historian will try to recount, from his own recollections, pieced out by the records and the most trustworthy tales of the survivors. But one of the participants was still missing.
He was on—the Tuesday after the wedding—conversing with none other than Queer Hat, the painter who had walked from the wharf so abruptly that morning of Ben's return, and who was destined to have nothing more to do with Sally's life except, perhaps, his propelling of the Unknown into it.
He—that is Queer Hat—was still daubing away, erasing and retouching his portrait, presumably for the Academy. For a fellow of only moderate talent, it wasn't a half bad portrait at that. Being one of those chaps who never can allow an opinion or observation to go unexpressed, he was haranguing the stranger, a friend of a few months, on the virtues of the portrait or its fair original.
"It's the damndest thing to get—begging your pardon" (he bowed to the canvas), "I mean that compounding of
168
