"So do we," said Ching. "We do not ask you to depart until the need grows urgent. But remember. We must dock at Singapore, and thence home to England will occupy the best part of two months. The Humming Top is long and narrow, with a very low freeboard. The bulwarks of her monkey fo'c'sle are not more than twelve feet above the water, and her stern is no more than seven. She can live anywhere, but she was built for speed and fair weather cruising; if we ram her through the autumn gales in the northern hemisphere she will be a very wet and uncomfortable ship. The seas will be all over bridge and charthouse and smokeroom, and you will have to live battened down. You won't like that, Madame, and your maid Marie will yield up her immortal soul."
"I am not worrying about Marie's soul—or her stomach," said Madame callously. "How long can you give me?"
"Four weeks," said Ching firmly. "If we sail towards the end of July we should be in English waters by the middle of October at latest."
"Make it so," said Madame. "I promise that you shall hoist the Blue Peter—is that right?—before the end of July. And perhaps sooner. For at the rate at which events are moving, Willatopy may soon determine to transport his person and fortunes to England. At the last, if all my persuasions that he should remain here fail—and I am afraid that they must fail—I shall offer him passage in the Humming Top. It is fitting that the Lord of Topsham should enter upon his inheritance on board a Toppys ship. Sir John Toppys will not be best pleased, but if Willatopy insists, the haughty Family must swallow their medicine, and pretend that they like it. Noblesse oblige! So long as the Humming Top is available, Lord Topsham must not travel in a hired steamer. Besides," added Madame with a smile, "I shall be able to keep my eye and perhaps my hand upon that detestable little cad, the indispensable managing clerk. And if the sea should be very rough, perhaps a kindly Neptune might whisk him overboard."
"If you give the word, Madame, he shall go overboard all right," said Ching, the descendant of Plymouth buccaneers.
"No. I will not allow crime where I command. I am not squeamish; in my time I have shot more men than one or two, and when I shoot to kill, a soul is sped. But what I have done by way of duty, or in self-defence, has not been crime. Unless he provoked me beyond endurance, I would not slay even John Clifford."
"If I could do a wee bit murder on the swine under the rose, and stuff his corpse into a firebox, it would not distur-r-b my slumbers," observed Ewing. "But men talk, men talk. If the two of them sail with us in the Humming Top, and the weather comes on sweet and dirty, we must put up powerful petitions to an all-wise Providence. From the look of the beast, I should judge that he has a taste for whisky. Now, whisky, discreetly administered, might help the Divine wisdom to interpose with an effective boost, when Clifford reeled against a lee rail. We are all in the hands of God," concluded Alexander piously.
"We are a sweet crowd," observed Madame, with an air of detachment. "We borrow the yacht of a highly respectable baronet and profiteer. On the voyage out we convert her into a rollicking dope smuggler. We now contemplate petitions to the Almighty that He should boost a drunken Hedge Lawyer over our rail while on the voyage home. And withal, we are God-fearing members of some Christian Church. I, it must be confessed, am an indifferent Catholic. Alexander is a Scotch Presbyterian...."
"An Elder when at home in Paisley," interjected the Chief—"and Captain Ching is what—a Plymouth Brother?"
"Never," declared Ching in horror. "The Church of England for me. I will have no truck with sectarians."