“From what? Where do you come up with that diagnosis? He already fathered a son, so doesn’t that suggest that it wasn’t him? That neither of them was sterile, that her not conceiving was just the luck of the draw?”

“It’s in his logbooks. In ’seventy-six he made a note that he’d caught the mumps and had to turn Main Chance over to his first mate while he recovered. I researched this. Before there was any such thing as mumps vaccine, the disease was a cause of sterility in men. Not as much as gonorrhea, but it was up there.”

“All right. So go ahead.”