Blood looked at Harman, and Harman looked at Blood. Then telling Ginnell that they would consider the matter, they went on deck to talk it over.
There was truth in what Ginnell said. They would want help in getting the coin ashore in safety, and, unless they marooned or murdered Ginnell, he, if left out, would always be a witness to make trouble. Besides, though engaged on a somewhat shady business, neither Blood nor Harman was a scoundrel. Ginnell up to this had been paid out in his own coin, the slate was clean, and it pleased neither of them to take profit from this blackguard beyond what they considered their due.
It was just this touch of finer feeling that excluded them from the category of rogues and made their persons worth considering and their doings worth recounting.
“We’ll give him what he asks,” said Blood, when the consultation was over, “and, mind you, I don’t like giving it him one little bit, not on account of the money, but because it seems to make us partners with that swab. I tell you this, Billy Harman, I’d give half as much again if an honest man was dealing with us in this matter instead of Pat Ginnell.”
“And what honest man would deal with us?” asked the ingenuous Harman. “Lord! One might think the job we was on was tryin’ to sell a laundry. It’s safe enough, for who can say we didn’t hit the wreck cruisin’ round promiscuous, but it won’t hold no frills in the way of honesty and such. Down with you, and close the bargain with that chap and tip him the wink that, though we’re mugs enough to give him six thousand dollars for the loan of his old shark boat, we’re men enough to put a pistol bullet in his gizzard if he tries any games with us. Down you go.”
Blood went.
II
Next morning, an hour after sunrise, through the blaze of light striking the Pacific across the far-off Californian coast, San Juan showed like a flake of spar on the horizon to southward.
The sea there was all of an impossible blueness, the Pacific blue deepened by the Kuro Shiwo current, that mysterious river of the sea which floods up the coast of Japan, crosses the Pacific toward Alaska, and sweeps down the West American seaboard to fan out and lose itself away down somewhere off Chile.
Harman judged the island to be twenty miles away, and as they were making six and a half knots, he reckoned to hit it in three hours if the wind held.