"I see that you are making mountains out of molehills," I retorted. "What does Goff say about this potential mutiny?"
Van Dyck shook his head as if the mention of Goff merely added to the difficulties of the situation.
"That is another thing: Goff may be in it himself. He is an awful tough-looking old pirate. Don't you think so?"
"What I think is that you must have been completely off your head when you changed from your Atlantic-liner master and crew to this old fisherman and his Portuguese."
"Er—somebody recommended him; I forget just who it was," he went on to explain. "I needed a sailing-master who knew the Caribbean well, and who would do what he was told to do and ask no questions. You see the—er—shipping of the quarter million made some difference, and I couldn't afford to have too much intelligence aboard."
Again there was a pause, during which I was trying to persuade myself that this half-hearted young man across the stateroom table from me was really the same Bonteck Van Dyck who had coached crews, captained the 'Varsity football, and had otherwise proved himself a man and a leader of men—the sort of leader who fights to the final gasp, and even then doesn't know when he is beaten. The inability to do it put a little unconscious scorn into my summing-up of the situation.
"It is up to you, of course," I said. "We are merely your guests, and what you say is what we shall do. At the same time, I think—in fact I know—that you could count upon practically every man in our much-mixed passenger list to help you put down a mutiny."
"That is it—that is just why I sent for you, Dick," he cut in eagerly. "I knew you would be all for making a fight, and that you would probably lead it. For the sake of the women there mustn't be any scrap, you know. It would scare them into hysterics, naturally. If it should come to a showdown we must just make up our minds to take it easy—take the line of the least resistance—if you get what I mean. At the very worst, the mutineers couldn't well do more than to put us ashore somewhere, so that they might have a chance to search the yacht for the money. I have had that in mind all along, and when you came in just now I was trying to figure out our present latitude and longitude. Have you any idea where we are?"
"Trying to figure out?" I echoed. "Do you mean to tell me calmly that you—a navigator yourself and the owner of this ship—don't know where we are?"
"I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know—precisely. Goff keeps the reckoning, you see, and I have thought that perhaps he wasn't giving me the correct figures."