"Sailormen don't count pennies," said the man curtly. "Besides, the skipper—Cap'n Pontifex—he used to know Cap'n Hathaway. Friends, they were."
"And he expects to get some information through Miss Hathaway?"
Ericksen's freckled features reddened. His one satanic eyebrow twitched upward.
"Aye, that's true enough; but what it is, ain't for me to say. 'You mind your jaw-tackle, boatswain,' says the skipper. That's all."
"Mr. Dennis will go West with us," said Florence Hathaway softly, extending the pictures to Dennis. "You will furnish expenses, Mr. Ericksen?"
"Aye, miss." In the light-blue eyes Dennis read a sudden avid gleam. They were very dangerous, those eyes, very predatory and unscrupulous. "Aye, miss—here an' now."
The seaman drew from his pocket a small roll of bills and counted off three fifties which he extended to Dennis. The latter took them. The eyes of the two men met and held; and again Dennis felt that sense of enmity, of forced geniality, as though the man were concealing a deadly hostility beneath a show of eager conciliation. First Boatswain Joe had desired to propitiate him; now he desired to propitiate Florence Hathaway.
Dennis shoved the money into his pocket, despite a glance of entreaty from the girl.
The photographs numbered four; in each was shown a figure in a wheel-chair—and the figure was that of Captain Hathaway. Dennis had seen other and older pictures of Florence Hathaway's father, and he recognized at once that massive countenance, that giant frame, those wide and unafraid eyes. He looked less at this figure, however, than at those others showing in the pictures.
One was Captain Pontifex—a man tall and thin, face cavernous and pallid, with deep-sunk eyes and a curled black moustache. Another was that of Mrs. Pontifex—"the Missus", as Boatswain Joe termed her; her face was indistinct, although her figure seemed very large. In two of the pictures Ericksen himself showed. The only other figure was that of a black man, quite indistinct, whom Ericksen described as the skipper's mate, Manuel Mendez, a "black Portuguese" from the Cape Verde Islands. Tom Dennis returned the envelope to Ericksen.