“No, you wouldn’t, my boy! The only fun of having money left one is to try to make it grow. I expect you chuck some of your wretched screw away betting on these beggarly races where every horse is run crooked.”
“Why, how much do you suppose I have over after paying for my living?” asked the younger man, indignantly.
“I know, old chap. Can’t think how you manage to live on it as it is. Now, look here! Can you keep your mouth shut?”
“No.”
“Don’t play the fool. I think you can,” said Benion, examining him doubtfully. “I always liked your looks, or I shouldn’t want now to make your fortune. I suppose you’d stick to me if I made your fortune?”
“Better try!” laughed Allen.
Benion, with a great air of mystery, drew him out of Macquarie Street among the trees that grew in that part of Sydney which is now called Hyde Park. When they were a hundred yards from any possible listener he unburdened his soul in a hoarse whisper. “There will never be a chance like this again. A schooner came in last night from Honolulu in ballast, and the two chaps that own her talk of fitting her out for a trading voyage in the islands—in a devil of a hurry too. There was a lot of talk about it, and all sorts of yarns flying about, because people going to the islands aren’t, as a rule, in a hurry, and don’t mind being asked questions.”
“What sort of looking chaps are they?”
“Oh, Yankees, I expect; but they are burnt as dark as niggers, and wear red sashes round their waists with belts over them,—the rig they wear in the islands, they say. Anyhow, when men want a shipload of goods in a hurry, and do the mystery-man about where they’re going to, it’s pretty clear that there’s money in it, and that they don’t want any one else to get before them. But I mean to be before them.”