“Just so,” replied the Captain. “You didn’t fancy I was going to invite the blighters aboard to inspect our armaments, did you?”
VII
CHRISTOBAL
Christobal Island lay two days’ steaming away. It was a tiny place set all alone in the wastes of the sea.
There was only one trading station there, and it was run by a German on behalf of a German firm. This person’s name was Sprengel, and, to use the words that Blood applied to him some years before the date of this story, he had everything of the Red Indian about him except the gentleman.
Sprengel was a Prussian, close-clipped, clever, hard, and persistent as the east wind that blows over East Prussia in the spring. He had managed to keep other traders away from Christobal Island. Trade was his god; he had one ideal only—money, and, with the Teutonic passion for alien slang, he declared that in Christobal he was the only pebble on the beach.
The place, though German, was free to all men, absolutely free, yet Sprengel kept it absolutely German. No one could compete with him. Other traders had tried, but their business had wilted; antagonistic influences had worked mysteriously against them.
Blood had brought a cargo of trade here once for a friend. The friend, Samson by name, had put his all into a little schooner and a cargo of all sorts of “notions”—canned salmon, gin, tobacco, prints, knives, et cetera. He had taken Blood along as skipper. Bad luck had followed them to several islands, and here at Christobal had finished them. Blood rightly had put down their failure to Sprengel, and the glorious idea of getting even with Sprengel now haunted him so that he could not sleep.
His one dread was that Sprengel, having made his pile, might have gone back to Bromberg to enjoy it.