Hammer relapsed into sulky silence, and presently Harcourt left the bridge to him and sought his cabin, while the American remained staring moodily at the purplish-blue Jeb el Geneffeh hills to the south-west, for the Daphne was passing through the Bitter Lakes, midway of the Suez Canal.
Until reaching Port Said, the cruise had been perfect in every way, and his half-realized suspicions of John Solomon had completely fallen into abeyance.
As Harcourt said, the man had proved to be very useful, indeed; he seemed to have a perfect knowledge of port regulations everywhere; he attended to customs and pratique expeditiously, and almost made himself indispensable at mess, with his unfailing good humour and occasional fragments of home-made philosophy.
In fact, he seemed to have taken a liking to Hammer, and the American had begun to reciprocate it—until Port Said.
Here, barely an hour before they left for Suez, word was brought aboard that three of the German crew were in the hands of the Sudanese police. Dr. Krausz, who, with his secretary, had not left his cabin a dozen times during the cruise, went ashore with Harcourt in furious excitement, but returned considerably subdued.
It seemed that the three men had fallen foul of some French and Arabs in the native quarter, that a row had arisen, and one of the French had been stabbed.
Consequently, there was nothing to be done save to place the matter in the hands of the German Consul and go on, since Krausz did not wish to be detained pending the case.
As another of the crew was down with eye-trouble and ought to be left behind in hospital John Solomon had offered to pick up three or four natives who could make themselves generally useful, and after some hesitation, Krausz accepted, and the supercargo had promptly got his four Arabs aboard.
When, the next morning, Hammer had found Solomon talking Arabic with three of them in shelter of a ventilator, he had at once laid the affair of the black wallet before Harcourt, all his suspicions aroused.
But the Englishman laughed him down, and even Hammer had to admit that there was nothing very terrible about the pudgy little man. So while the Daphne pursued her course through the sandy wastes to Port Ibrahim and Suez, Cyrus Hammer gradually threw off his almost groundless suspicions and took on his usual good-humoured manner once more.