Blood, allowing himself to be conducted to this resting place, Ginnell followed without drawing the attention of the others in the bar.
Arrived in the back room, Blood collapsed on an old couch by the window, and, lying there with his eyes shut, he heard the rest.
He heard the whispered consultation between Harman and the other, the trapdoor being opened, Jim, the boatman, being called. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder and Ginnell’s voice adjuring him to rouse up a bit and come along for a sail.
Helped on either side by the conspirators, he allowed himself to be led to the trapdoor.
“We’ll never get him down them steps,” said Harman, alluding to the stairs leading down to where the boat was swaying on the green water that was swishing and swashing against the rotten piles of the wharf.
“This is the way it’s done,” said Ginnell, and, twitching Blood’s feet from under him, he sent him down the stairway like a bag of meal to where Jim was waiting to receive him.
At half past six o’clock that day the Heart of Ireland—that was the name of Ginnell’s boat—passed the tumble of the bar and took the swell of the Pacific like a duck.
Ginnell, giving the wheel over to one of the Chinese crew, glanced to windward, glanced back at the coast, where Tamalpais stood cloud-wrapped and gilded by the evening sun, and then turned to the companionway leading down to the hole of a cabin where they had deposited their shanghaied man.
“I’m goin’ to rouse that swab up,” he said; “he ought to be recovered by this.”