"Well, I treated you so badly that I don't deserve much at your hands, my dear," he said, with feigned penitence, "but for the sake of old times let me call you by the old name."
"My uncle will not like it. He will be here soon, and should he hear you call me by so intimate a name he will be angry. He is very, very particular."
Jarman privately thought that an ex-skipper, who had cast away a schooner and had to change his name for that reason, had no need to be so scrupulous. But he did not believe in the relationship, and suspected that Fairy Fan was telling glib lies. However, it suited him to accept the story she set forth, and he swallowed the scrupulous Captain Banjo Berry along with the other fiction.
"I'll call you Miss Berry when he comes, but till then--" He looked imploringly.
She gave him a coquettish smile. "Very well, till then, Eustace!"
Jarman knew perfectly well that she was calculating to make use of him, and wished her to think so. Should she accept him as a colleague in the swindle which she and her so-called uncle were perpetrating, he might more easily penetrate the secret of Starth's murder.
"Then tell me, Fan, was it ever discovered who killed Anchor?"
"How you harp on that, Eustace! Yes. An old partner of his, whom he cheated in connection with a mining claim, shot him."
"And who thrust the knife into his heart?"
"A Chinaman. He found the body, or rather, he found Anchor dying, and intended to rob him. When Anchor opened his eyes and tried to sing out for the police Lo Keong knifed him. The Chinaman has been hanged, but the man who fired the shot got away. And now don't let's talk any more about the matter; it gives me the horrors. I'm doing very well here, and I hope to make a lot of money. Then I shall retire."