"As I say—if I'm not much mistaken. I had a pretty good chance to familiarize myself with his face that night in the hotel dining-room in New Orleans, and I have a fairly decent memory for faces."
Van Dyck fell into a muse, breaking the silence finally to say: "By Jove, Dick, that may prove to be a horse of another color, don't you know!"
Waiving the question as to what the color of the original horse might have been, I stuck to the point at issue.
"If, as you say, you have gotten rid of the money, the situation can't be very alarming. Including engineers, firemen and cabin servants, you can't have over thirty-five or forty men in the crew, all told. There are nine of us in the cabin, and Haskell and the Americans will all stand with us. If we get together and put up a good front——"
Van Dyck interrupted hastily—over-hastily, I thought, for a man of his inches and determination in other fields.
"It is not to be thought of, Dick; not for a single moment, with all these women aboard. Besides, we have no arms. We'd be shot down in cold blood if it should come to blows."
This was so singularly unlike the Bonteck Van Dyck I had known best in the college days that it fairly made me gasp.
"Why, Bonteck!" I exclaimed; "what has come over you? You don't mean to say that you would calmly hand the yacht over to those fellows if they should ask you for it?"
"It might easily be the only thing to do," he asserted, half mechanically. "Of course, as I say, we haven't the money, and they would have their trouble for their pains, after all. Still, it might be difficult to convince them that the gol—the money has been actually disposed of. If they learned in New York that we really took it on board, and didn't learn afterward that it was disembarked elsewhere . . . well, you see how it stacks up, don't you?"