The Captain called for him now and gave the bridge over to him, as all was plain sailing with the California coast away on the port quarter, the Farallons on the starboard bow, and the whole blue Pacific Ocean right ahead.
He and Harman, leaving the bridge, sought the chart room and went in there for a smoke. It was a pleasant place, full of light, and with a couch running along one side. By the door stood a rack of rifles, eight in number, and for every rifle a cutlass.
Cable ships go armed. They never know, when they leave port to do a job, what new job may not suddenly call them to the Patagonian beaches or the fogs of the Yellow Sea. The rifles and cutlasses were part of the fixtures belonging to the Penguin and taken over by the new owners, just as fixtures are taken over with a house. To use them for their proper purpose could never have occurred to the minds of Shiner, Wolff & Co. They were not men of violence. The strange thing, indeed, about this expedition, organised and manned for lawless work on the deep sea, was the fact that the chiefs were, to use Harman’s phrase, “sure-enough city men,” and that they were even now down below dead sick with the Pacific’s first fringe of swell.
Harman took a rifle down and examined it, while Blood, extending his leg on the couch, lit a pipe.
“Say,” said Harman, “are you any good as a shot?”
“Not with a thing like that,” replied the Captain. “I can hit a man with a revolver at ten paces, and that’s all the good shooting I want. Put that thing down and don’t be fooling with it.”
“It’s not loaded,” replied Harman, who had opened the breech.
“And it’s not likely to be,” replied the other, “for there’s no ammunition on board and no need for it. If we’re caught, there must be no fighting.”
“Why, I thought you was a fighting man,” said Harman, putting the rifle back. “You have the name for it.”
“And so I am, when fighting is to be had on the square; but there’s fighting and fighting. Can’t you see, if we were caught tinkering at some cable we had no right to be meddling with, and if we were chased by some gunboat, and if we were to fight and draw blood—can’t you see we’d be hanged without benefit of clergy? No, I never fight against the law. Never have and never will.”