"But let's get down to business, Hammer. I've been thinking this over, and since I am frankly down and out, as you Americans would say, I've no notion of depending on myself alone. I'm a pretty good character-reader, Hammer, and I liked you at first sight or I wouldn't make this offer. Other things being equal, how would you like to take a junior partnership in the Daphne?"
Hammer looked at him silently, wondering if the man meant what he said. But the other was plainly in earnest, and, moreover, Hammer thought that he had seldom met a man to whom he was so attracted. That the liking was mutual there seemed to be no doubt; but would it last?
"I don't know," he returned slowly. "I'm no sailor, for one thing—I'm a cattle-boat hand, and nothing else. I can't see where I'd be any good."
"No matter," declared Harcourt impatiently. "You could soon pick up navigation; for that matter, there are plenty of men in command of craft without proper license. However, I'm not figuring on you as a sailor. I can do that, but I don't know a bally thing about business. You could handle the business end of everything and gradually work into handling the ship; she'd be my property, of course, but we'd share even on what we made."
"Go slow now," and Hammer laughed quietly while the waiter hovered about them. Then, when they were once more alone, he went on: "Better let me spin you my yarn first, then see how far you'd be willing to trust me."
Hammer's real name was Cyrus Murray, and until three years before this time he had been engaged in a profitable brokerage business in New York City. Alone in the world, he had made his own way, and in the course of its making he had contracted a hasty and ill-advised marriage with a girl who was in no way fitted to be his wife.
It was a sordid little tragedy, by no means uncommon in American life of to-day; but, unfortunately for Murray, his wife had been the first to discover that it was a tragedy.
He glossed over this portion of the tale in its telling, merely stating that he had allowed her to obtain a divorce, and had turned over to her the greater part of his worldly goods; but he had been hard hit by the entire affair.
Impulsively, he had thrown his business overboard, and one night, in reckless desperation, he sought shelter from his thoughts by shipping aboard a cattle-boat. Curiously enough, before he reached Liverpool he had found that in spite of the terribly rough life, in spite of the almost daily battles for existence into which his very appearance and manner flung him, the hard physical labour and the tortured weariness of his body was a relief to his mind. Then the liquor.
So for three years he had been traversing the Atlantic, working hard, fighting hard, drinking hard; his ambition was destroying; he took savage zest in bullying the thugs and degenerates who were his companions in misfortune, and he had thought himself fairly content at the level to which he had sunk.