"Well, well, I suppose it must be so, but in my opinion it's dirt cheap at the money. And, look here, Mr. Veneda, my mate tells me something about a grey-haired chap who wanted to come off too. Now what about him?"
"Never you mind about him, he won't trouble you. We've done with him for ever."
"Don't you be too sure of that; if he wants you so badly that he had to pull off after you, he's not going to let you slip so easily; and what's more, if he knows the name of your boat, he'll nail you by cable in Tahiti as soon as winkin'. There are more ways of killing a cat than choking him with butter, Mr. Veneda."
"I don't doubt it, but as he doesn't know the name of the boat, by your own argument I'm quite safe," Veneda said, throwing the stump of his cigar overboard into the curdling wake.
"Well, all I can say is, if he don't know it, he don't deserve to."
"But how the deuce could he know it?"
"Why, simply because, as I say, he followed you off," said the skipper, with the superiority of a man who makes a statement knowing his facts to be all right, "and because, just as we'd got way on her, he came alongside and tried to hook on. If she hadn't been going too fast for him, he'd 'a been aboard; as it was he had to slip astern."
"And you think he read her name?" Veneda muttered hoarsely.
"O' course he did. Why, he couldn't have helped it if he had eyes in his head and knew his letters."
This unexpected news so staggered Veneda that for a moment it deprived him of speech. He began to experience an awful dread, not of the discovery of the means whereby he had obtained his fortune, but of the disclosure of the precious secret which guarded it. Instinctively he felt for the locket he wore round his neck, and in which reposed the slip of paper Juanita was so anxious to obtain.