Meeker stood with folded arms and grinned at me as he saw my pistols taken by the captain; and for the first time since I had seen him he dropped his sanctimonious pose and looked anything but the decrepit old missionary which he had always seemed. His shoulders were squared and his head thrown back, and there was mockery in his eyes.
But it was not so much his insolent and triumphant look which took my attention as the manner in which he stood upon the heaving deck of the saloon; his knees had that limp sea-bend of the sailor and his out-turned toes seemed to grasp the uncertain rise and fall of the carpet beneath his feet; he was a mariner now, not a preacher, for no landsman could hold himself so easily in a vessel which pitched and rolled in the long swells of the China Sea.
I looked at him defiantly, and his eyes seemed to dare me to speak out and say the things which were in my mind. He seemed to understand that I was trying to frame a denunciation, for I was white to the lips with rage at him.
"You seemed determined to sail in the Kut Sang, Mr. Trenholm," he said: "So your insistence to be a passenger was to slay a fellow-man, was it? I am shocked beyond measure!"
"You hound!" I screamed. "You have played your cards well, you and your little red-headed scoundrel! If you think I am a spy you will find—"
"Tut, tut, Sally Ann!" said Captain Riggs. "We can't have any of that.
Hold your tongue, sir, or I'll have you in irons."
"If you'll give me ten minutes privately, captain, I'll tell you who this devil—"
"I'm a man of the cloth, and I will not countenance such language!" shrieked Meeker in an attempt to check me; but I could see that I had cut him deeply, for he whitened and stepped toward me with closed fist. "Don't you call me devil! You know nothing of me—tell it if you will—what do you know? Where did you get that name?"
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" said Riggs, still holding one of my pistols in his hand, and keeping an eye on the bulkhead door for the return of the mate.
"He's a Japanese spy," I said. "He's no missionary at all, but a spy, and the fool believes that I am in the Russian service. He tried to hold me in Manila, and when I would not listen to his lies he has taken this way to discredit me, probably have me hanged! It's all a plot—"