“’Cos it can’t.”
“Very well. Good-night, then. I’m going straight from this house to the coastguard station, and shall send two armed men out to the hulk to arrest the murderer you’ve been harbouring, and two more to arrest you—you can’t get far away in the meantime—for harbouring him and for being an accessory after the fact. I suppose you know what the punishment for that is? And when you come out you’ll be a ruined man. The hulk-owners will discharge you without a character for gross violation of rules.”
He looked murder, and had he been less of a coward might have attempted as well as looked it. Then something seemed to occur to him, and he stood staring absently at me while turning the matter over in his bovine brain. I guessed the upshot of his meditations to be somewhat as follows: “This man, whoever he is, has me in his power and can ruin me. I wish he were out of the way, but I don’t mean risking my own neck for him. If I let him go on the hulk Winton is more than likely to suspect he’s a spy. In that case he’s just the sort of man to knock the meddling fool on the head, and the job I want done would get done without my putting my neck in a noose.”
Anyhow, he looked at me curiously for a minute, and then said, in a more conciliatory tone,—
“What are you going to do to Winton?”
“Arrest him by-and-bye. If I can I’ll keep your name out of it. If I can’t, and you lose your crib, I’ll make it up to you in some way. But let me tell you one thing: you’d better play me fair, or it will be the worse for you. The ‘Cuban Queen’ is being watched night and day, and if you tell Winton of your meeting with me, and he tries to escape or you try to give us the slip yourself, you’ll be instantly arrested, and it will go hard with you then. Play me fair and I’ll play you fair, and no harm need come to you at all in the matter. Once more, will you come to my terms? If not, I’m off to the coastguard station. There’s only one policeman in Canvey, and I shall want two or three men—armed men—for Winton, and the same for you. I mean business, I can tell you. Come, is it Yes or No?”
“Yes,” he answered, with a horrible oath. And then we sat down to arrange the details of our little conspiracy.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I BOARD THE “CUBAN QUEEN” FOR THE SECOND TIME
“But when you had satisfied yourself that there was a man in hiding on the ‘Cuban Queen,’” says the reader, “and when you had every reason for suspecting that man to be Mullen, why not at once arrest him? Why go to work like Tom Sawyer in ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ who, when he wished to rescue Jim the nigger from the woodshed, must needs make a seven days’ job of it, and dig the poor wretch out, when it would have been an easy matter to abstract the key and let him out through the door?”
Why? Well, for several reasons, one of which is that the story would then have been shorter and perhaps less interesting. Another is that, though it is true I had good cause to suppose the man in hiding to be James Mullen, I had no actual proof of his identity.