“We’ve always dealt square by each other, you and I,” said the captain, when he had lighted his cigar. Then he fell into a reminiscent humor, and presently broke into a chuckling laugh.
“If it hadn’t been for you, them Dons would have had me up against the wall and shot me, sure as fate,” he said, bringing his hand down on his knee with a keen sense of enjoyment. “That was ten years ago last November, when the Minnie had been out of the builder’s yard a matter of six months.”
“Yes,” said Cartoner, putting the dates carefully together in his mind. It seemed that the building of the Minnie was not the epoch upon which he reckoned his periods.
“She’s in Morrison’s dry-dock now,” said the captain, who in a certain way was like a young mother. For him all the topics were but a number of byways leading ultimately to the same centre. “You should go down and see her, Mr. Cartoner. It’s a big dock. You can walk right round her in the mud at the bottom of the dock and see her finely.”
Cartoner said he would. They even arranged a date on which to carry out this plan, and included in it an inspection of the Minnie’s new boiler. Then Captain Cable remembered what he had come for, and the plan was never carried out after all.
“Yes,” he said, “you’ve a reckoning against me, Mr. Cartoner. I have never done you a good turn that I know of, and you saved my life, I believe, that time—you and that Frenchman who talks so quick, Moonseer Deulin—that time, over yonder.”
And he nodded his head towards the southwest with the accuracy of one who never loses his bearings. For there are some people who always know which is the north; and others who, if asked suddenly, do not know their left hand from their right; and others, again, who say—or shout—that all men are created equal.
“I’ve been done, Mr. Cartoner—that is what I’ve come to tell you. Me that has always been so smart and has dealt straight by other men. Done, hoodwinked, tricked—same as a Sunday-school teacher. And I can do you a good turn by telling you about it; and I can do the other man a bad turn, which is what I want to do. Besides, it’s dirty work. Me, that has always kept my hands—”
He looked at his hands, and decided not to pursue the subject.
“You’ll say that for me, Mr. Cartoner—you that has known me ten years and more.”
“Yes, I’ll say that for you,” answered Cartoner, with a laugh.
“They did me!” cried the captain, leaning forward and banging his hand down on the table, “with the old trick of a bill of lading lost in the post and a man in a gold-laced hat that came aboard one night and said he was a government official from the Arsenal come for his government stuff. And it wasn’t government stuff, and he wasn’t a government official. It was—”
Captain Cable paused and looked carefully round the room. He even looked up to the ceiling, from a long habit of living beneath deck skylights.
“Bombs!” he concluded—“bombs!”
Then he went further, and qualified the bombs in terms which need not be set down here.
“You know me and you know the Minnie, Mr. Cartoner!” continued the angry sailor. “She was specialty built with large hatches for machinery, and—well, guns. She was built to carry explosives, and there’s not a man in London will insure her. Well, we got into the way of carrying war material. It was only natural, being built for it. But you’ll bear me out, and there are others to bear me out, that we’ve only carried clean stuff up to now—plain, honest, fighting stuff for one side or the other. Always honest—revolutions and the like, and an open fight. But bombs—”
And here again the captain made use of nautical terms which have no place on a polite page.
“There’s bombs about, and it’s me that has been carrying them,” he concluded. “That is what I have got to tell you.”
“How do you know?” asked Cartoner, in his gentle and soothing way.
The captain settled himself in his chair, and crossed one leg over the other.
“Know the Johannis Bulwark, in Hamburg?”
Cartoner nodded.
“Know the Seemannshaus there?”
“Yes. The house that stands high up among the trees overlooking the docks.”
“That’s the place,” said Captain Cable. “Well, one night I was up there, on the terrace in front of the house where the sailors sit and spit all day waiting to be taken on. Got into Hamburg short-handed. I was picking up a crew. Not the right time to do it, you’ll say, after dark, as times go and forecastle hands pan out in these days. Well, I had my reasons. You can pick up good men in Hamburg if you go about it the right way. A man comes up to me. Remembered me, he said; had sailed with me on a voyage when we had machinery from the Tyne that was too big for us, and we couldn’t get the hatches on. We sailed after nightfall, I recollect, with hatches off, and had the seas slopping in before the morning. He remembered it, he said. And he asked me if it was true that I was goin’—well, to the port I was bound for. And I said it was God’s truth. Then he told me a long yarn of two cases outshipped that was lying down at the wharf. Transshipment goods on a through bill of lading. And the bill of lading gone a missing in the post. A long story, all lies, as
