As the imperturbable Mr. Miller reached the deck of the Santa Margarita, he took stock, for the second time within a few minutes, of his immediate surroundings.
He saw an exceedingly dirty deck on which the smuts from the galley chimney appeared to have become embedded through long years of neglect. He smelt the very rich, nourishing odor of spaghetti fried with garlic, and sniffed unappreciatively, in spite of his hunger. He heard a couple of nasal voices chanting cheerfully, but with an exceedingly labored accent, the Bersaglieri quickstep, and made a tiny grimace of protest. Around him the panorama of sea was empty of all shipping. Land was out of sight.
Muhammed leaned lazily against the tiller and eyed his late employer with the stolid apathy which an Oriental alone can make convincing. Lounging against the panel of the companion hatch, from which Landon and his companion had just emerged, sat the skipper, Signor Luigi, idly whittling a stick, and looking up at his passenger with an amiable indifference.
Miller, it must be remembered, had just passed a night of great discomfort and mental agitation following a most unanticipated shock. His nerves—is it wonderful?—were at tension. In spite of his own imperturbability, on which he set some store, the insouciant aspect of his surroundings jarred on him. Was kidnapping, then, such an everyday affair that men cooked, and sang, and whittled under his very nose while the pirate's gallows very possibly stood awaiting them? He had probably never approached petulance more nearly in the course of his well-ordered existence.
He turned to Landon with a little shrug.
The other was holding out the half of a yard-long roll of bread, with a lump of doubtful-looking cheese.
"I would have suggested a plateful of that spaghetti, my dear Miller," he smiled, "but my watchful eye understood the curl of your nostril. This is at least clean."
Miller drew an edge of tarpaulin over a heaped rope, and, after a regretful glance at his no longer immaculately gray trousers, sat down. He took the bread and cheese and began to eat slowly.
There was something bovine in the manner in which he carefully champed each mouthful, something ruminative about the way in which he looked around him. But behind this stolid mask of indifference his brain was working rapidly. He was putting facts as they appeared to him to the test of logic and experience. His mental summing up was rapid. A felucca, of Italian register: crew, three men and a boy. Engaged in the contraband trade more or less continuously, for the ingeniously contrived lazaret between the cabin and the galley showed an attention to detail made necessary by continual service. The real mast passed through the centre of his prison of the previous night. Yet the half of a mast, a sham half, of course, passed through the partition and showed in the cabin. Doubtless another half was to be seen likewise in the galley. It was a neat idea; there was nothing to indicate to the casual glance of a custom's officer that the partition between the two was not what it appeared to be. Nothing but actual measurements would discover the space which hid the intervening lazaret.
With the tonic of food, his self-reliance was entirely his again. He turned to confront Landon after half a dozen mouthfuls, alert to probe for the limits of his position. Landon had greatly dared. Did he understand how greatly? Miller felt himself restored to a state of energy and resolution which would very quickly find out.