“Nothing doing there!” he announced. “Say, ask the old boy what he’s been hanging around here a week for.”
Reluctantly the ensign put the question.
“None of your tamt pizness!” replied the skipper. “Put id’s no segret. Ve drobt a sbar offerboard in der night an ve been hunding vor id. Ve vasn’t here vor a veek—id vas night before ladst ve gum pack.”
Rawlins raised his eyebrows. “All right, Ensign,” he said. “Guess it’s a false alarm. Might as well be going.”
“Sorry to have troubled you, Captain,” said the ensign, touching his cap. “Expect you’re not the ship we were looking for.”
The skipper’s only reply was a low, rumbling bellow from his chest and stumping up the ladder to the bridge he jerked the bell for “stand by.”
No sooner were the boarding party again on the destroyer than Rawlins beckoned Mr. Pauling aside.
“You may think I’m an ass, Mr. Pauling,” remarked the diver. “But there’s something crooked about that Dutchman. He’s a blamed liar in the first place, because you know as well as I do he was here six days ago. In the second place, can you imagine wasting even two days steaming along and hunting for a lost spar, and how the blazes could he lose a spar? The sea’s been like glass.”
Mr. Pauling smiled. “You’re unduly suspicious, Rawlins,” he declared. “I admit the tramp was here a week ago and we saw her, but he may have gone on and then come back two days ago searching for a spar or he may have lied just because he wouldn’t give us the satisfaction of telling us his business. No, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him. If you suspect every ship we see we’ll have our hands full and every nation in the world will be after our scalps.”
“Well, Mr. Pauling,” replied Rawlins, “I hope you won’t be insulted if I say so and I don’t mean it that way; but you’re no seaman and you may be a mighty good detective on land, but you’re not when aboard ship. That old whale of a Dutchy has been anchored there and hasn’t been hunting for a blamed thing! And what’s more, he hasn’t been in Curacao for a year!”