“Hard and fast rule be blowed! You might as well apply that to the Valpy case,” naming a somewhat prominent lawsuit then going forward, and relating to a disputed succession. “If the Valpy in possession weren’t justified in sticking to possession when he knew the real heir was a congenital idiot, and a homicidal one at that—why, there’s no such thing as any law of common sense.”
“What were the facts?” asked the man who had been appealed to from outside. “I have not been much in the way of reading the papers of late.”
They told him—several of them at once, as the way of a smoking-room gathering is. By judicious winnowing down he managed to elicit that a vast deal of property had been in dispute, that the holder had been an exemplary landlord, and, in short, a sort of Providence to all dependent on him; whereas the man who had successfully established his own claim, and thereby had ousted him, was one of those subjects for whom a few minutes in a lethal chamber would have constituted the only appropriate and adequate treatment. Indeed, the only matter of debate was as to whether the former holder, knowing that he was not legally entitled to remain in possession, was justified in retaining the same. Those here present were of opinion that he was.
“I don’t agree with you at all,” said the uncompromising man. “We can’t do evil that good may come of it. That’s the divine law, and—”
“Hallo! What’s the excitement?” interrupted somebody, as several persons hurried by the open door, some with binoculars in their hands.
“Oh, we’ve only sighted some ship, I suppose,” said the leader on the other side. “What I was going to say is—”
But ever so little to break the sea and sky monotony of a voyage will avail to raise a modicum of excitement; wherefore, what the speaker “was going to say” remained perforce unknown, for the group incontinently melted away in order to see what little there was to be seen.
That little was little enough. A solitary speck away towards the sky-line; to those who had binoculars, and soon to those who had not, taking shape—that shape the hull of a ship. Little enough in all conscience.
But—was it? The submerged hull of a ship and no more, save for two stumps of mast of uneven length sticking out of her. The poop and forecastle were above water, and in the wash of the increasing evening swell part of the bulwarks heaved up as the hulk rolled lazily, her rusty red sides, glistening and wet, showing a line of encrusting barnacles. This was what met the eager gaze of the passengers of the Baleka in the lurid, smoky glare of the tropical sunset as the steamer swept up to, and slowed down to pass, the sad relic; and there may have been some among them who noticed that the long, straight path of her foamy wake has undergone an abrupt deviation behind her—for the derelict had been lying right in her course.
Right in her course! An hour later and it would have been dark—very dark—and then!