But now, or there was no virtue in books, he
had talked of some desperate adventure of the Vikings, of Thorfin
Karlsefne's sailing to Wineland, which is America, in the ninth or
tenth century. The battle in the harbor he had seen; and his own
death he had described. But this was a much more startling plunge
into the past. Was it possible that he had skipped half a dozen
lives and was then dimly remembering some episode of a thousand
years later? It was a maddening jumble, and the worst of it was
that Charlie Mears in his normal condition was the last person in
the world to clear it up. I could only wait and watch, but I went to
bed that night full of the wildest imaginings. There was nothing
that was not possible if Charlie's detestable memory only held
good.
I might rewrite the Saga of Thorfin Karlsefne as it had never been
written before, might tell the story of the first discovery of
America, myself the discoverer. But I was entirely at Charlie's
mercy, and so long as there was a three-and-six-penny Bohn
volume within his reach Charlie would not tell.
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