"We Scots are proud of our national institutions," remarked Ewing, when Lisbon unfolded to him its charms as an abetter of crime, "until we come to experience their rotten foolishness. We are too intolerant and logical; give me the broadminded and wholly unscrupulous Dagoes for business partners. We lack sympathy with human weakness, but the Dagoes coin dollars out of it all the time. If I were a wee bit younger I would turn Dago myself."
When at last the Humming Top cast off at Lisbon and stretched away at her leisurely eleven knots for Colon and the South Seas she was stuffed with stores of "prodeegious richness," all insured.
"But go careful, Ching, if you love me," implored Ewing. "I have covered the lot on board of us at Lloyd's, but a claim won't bear looking into. If we do get wrecked this side of Valparaiso, it has got to be a thorough casualty. A total loss. A sunk ship tells no tales."
"We are not going to be lost," promised the Skipper.
"Speak softly, man," whispered Ewing. "Speak soft. Rub wood. Ye carry Cæsar and his fortunes. There is sair peril in boastfulness at sea."
To Madame the flagrant abuse of Sir John Toppys' marine hospitality was a rich jest, packed with many a subtle stimulus to laughter. One remorseless Fate—in the person of the late Hon. William Toppys—had given a coloured Head to an ultra-respectable and unimaginative English Family. A second Fate—in the person of naughty Madame Gilbert—had corrupted the virtue of the Family Yacht, and set her rollicking across the seas as a flagrantly unchaste smuggler. The private list of her "soul-raising" stores, designed to pander to the degenerate tastes of South American Dagoes, almost staggered Madame herself, and she turned for the solace of her seasoned conscience to the blameless manifest craftily prepared by Captain Ching for the edification of the Panama Canal Board.
"You are sure there will be no examination?" she asked the Skipper.
"Sure," he said confidently. "We are landing nothing in the Canal Zone, and the Board doesn't care two pins what we carry through."
"If that is so," murmured Madame; "if we get through without scandal, I will tell Sir John Toppys all about it. He is a white man, Captain Ching, who trusted me. One owes something," added Madame virtuously, "to a white man who really trusts one."
Confession after crime was to Madame—and I am afraid also to the "grandly releegious" Ewing—greatly to be preferred to weak repentance before hand.