“Sit down and finish your cigar,” Hawke advised him. “There’s no train for New York till nine o’clock to-night.”
“Yes, and there’s no fast steamer for South African ports at all. We’ll do best to sail for England, I fancy. Then the man who is going to India can take the P. and O., and the rest of us will go by the Union Castle Line to the Cape.”
“But which of us is going to India?” Elliott inquired.
“I don’t know.” Henninger glanced calculatingly at his companions. “I’d like to go to Zanzibar myself, if you don’t mind, because I suspect that it’s the dangerous point; and Sullivan should take Lorenzo Marques, because he was there once, and he knows something of the place. The shadowing lies between you two, as far as I can see.”
“I’ll match you for it,” proposed Hawke.
Elliott pulled out a quarter and spun it on the table, turning up tail. Hawke followed, and lost.
“I’m to be the tracker, then,” said Elliott. “I’m afraid I’ll make a poor sleuth. I wish Bennett had given us a description of the mate, for he has probably changed his name.”
“So do I. I’d like to have time to run up to St. Louis and talk it over with Bennett. I’d like a lot of things that we haven’t time for. Bennett can’t write with a broken arm, so there’s no use in writing to him for more details. But, as a matter of fact, I don’t really expect that you’ll come up with this man Burke at all. What I do hope is that you’ll find out where he went when he left Bombay, and if by chance he hired any kind of vessel anywhere, and in general what he was doing. We’ve got to get our information from him, there’s no doubt of that.”
“And what about Bennett?” Elliott inquired, after a pause. “How is he to come into the game?”
“The chances are that the game will be played before his arm’s mended,” said Henninger. “We’ll send him a hundred, as I suggested,—or let’s make it three hundred,—and of course he’ll share and share alike with the rest of us. I think I’d better write him to go to San Francisco as soon as he’s able to travel, if he hasn’t heard from us in the meantime, and hold himself in readiness there to join us. Frisco’ll be the most convenient port, and he can cable us his address as soon as he gets there.”