"Never, sir. I even made inquiry about her in Havana before we cleared to-day—that is, without exciting comment. A one-eyed stevedore said she drops in there maybe once or twice a year, but he didn't know from where. I've never seen her, and I've sailed close to thirty year most everywhere in these waters during winter seasons!"
"Well, I'm stumped," I admitted. "Let's take this to the professor and see what he makes of it." So we went down together.
Monsieur, in his stateroom, sat bent over his counterfeit bill when I quietly shoved the bomb in front of him. He sprang up with a broadside of expletives that in the sunlight would have cast a wondrous rainbow. It was a way with the little professor, and we had learned to keep respectfully distant during such periods of effervescing energy.
"Tied to our rudder post," I told him.
He seemed to grasp the entire situation at once. I have never known such a genius for corraling facts! In an instant his mind apparently galloped completely around the boundary of our discovery, and then circled in.
"You have made it harmless," was his first oral observation.
"Gates did, yes; he disconnected the clock-work."
"It is quickly made, and crude," he mused, turning it over in his hands, "but the work of one who is not a novice. Give me the other part!—um! Very pretty, very pretty, indeed!" Then he looked up, calling: "My boy Tommy, come! We are to see what we shall see!"
"See what?" Tommy sauntered in; but as we explained the situation he looked positively hopeful. For the chief quality in Tommy that made him so likable was his abiding love of danger. He would rather flirt with death than a ravishing coquette—though I will not deny his preference to play the pair.
"Oh, boy!" he now chuckled, giving my arm a squeeze.