“Is there any one thing left in this rotten old world,” said Conroy, “that’s worth doing?”
In Bob’s opinion there were several things very well worth doing. He suggested one of them at once.
“Let’s get out the Finola,” he said, “and go for a cruise. We’ve never done the South Sea Islands.”
The Finola was the largest of Conroy’s yachts, a handsome vessel of something over a thousand tons.
“Cruising in the Finola,” said Conroy, “is no earthly good to me. What I want is something that will put me into a nervous sweat, the same as I was when I was up against Ikenstein and the railway bosses. My nerves were like damned fiddle strings for a fortnight when I didn’t know whether I was going to come out a pauper or the owner of the biggest pile mortal man ever handled.”
Bob knew nothing of Ikenstein or the methods by which the pile had been wrested from him and his companions, but he did know the sensations which Conroy described. He, himself, arrived at them by hanging on to a sea anchor in a gale of wind off the Galway coast, or pushing a vicious horse at a nasty jump. Nervous sweat, stretched nerves and complete uncertainty about the immediate future afford the same delight however you get at them. He sympathized with Conroy.
“You might fit out a ship or two and try exploring round the South Pole,” Bob said. “They’ve got the thing itself of course, but there must be lots of places still undiscovered in the neighbourhood. I should think that hummocking along over the ice floes in a dog sledge must be pretty thrilling.”
Conroy sighed.
“I’m too fat,” he said, “and I’m too darned soft. The kind of life I’ve led for the last four years isn’t good training for camping out on icebergs and feeding on whale’s blubber.”
Bob smiled. Conroy was a very fat man. A camping party on an iceberg would be likely to end in some whale eating his blubber.