Captain Branscome lifted his head. "My mind, if you'll excuse me, ma'am, works a bit slowly, and always did. But there's no denying that Miss Plinlimmon has given the sense of it."
"Hey?"
"To be sure," said the Captain, tracing with his finger an imaginary pattern on the table-cloth, "her courage carries her too far—as in this talk about hiring a ship. A ship needs a crew; a crew that could be trusted on a treasure-hunt is perhaps the most difficult to find in the whole world; and when you've found one to rely upon, your troubles are only just beginning. The main trouble is with the ship, and that's what no landsman can ever understand. A ship's the most public thing under heaven. You think of her, maybe, as something that puts out over the horizon and is lost to sight for months. But that helps nothing. She must clear from a port, and to a port sooner or later she must return; and in both ports a hundred curious people at least must know all about her business.
"I don't say that a ship, once out of sight, cannot be made away with—though even that, with a crew to tell tales, has beaten some of the cleverest heads; but to take out a ship and fill her up with treasure, and bring her home and unload her without any one's knowing—that's a feat that (if you'll excuse me) I've heard a hundred liars discuss at one time and another; and one has said it can be done in this way, and another in that, but never a one in my hearing has found a way that would deceive a child."
"Yet you said, a moment since, that Miss Plinlimmon had given the sense of it?"
"I did, ma'am. I am saying that to fetch this treasure will be difficult, even if we find it—"
"You don't doubt its existence?"
"I do not, ma'am. I doubt it so little, ma'am, that I would ten times sooner engage to find than to fetch it. But I don't even despair of fetching it, if the lady goes on being as clever as she has begun."
"What?" exclaimed Plinny. "I? Clever?"
"Yes, indeed, ma'am," Captain Branscome answered, still in a slow, measured voice. "But, indeed, too, I might have been prepared for it when you started by taking a line that beats all my experience of landsmen; or perhaps in this case I ought to say landsladies."