“Well, I can’t charter boats, not even to you, Hank, it’s against my principles. Why, if I were to charter the old Wear Jack and the fact got round, I’d be guyed out of ’Frisco. Can’t you hear them at the Club asking me how the long-shore business was doing and what price the hire of canoes. No, sir, I’ve had enough of the joke business over that damned sieve. There she sticks till I sell her and the price is ten thousand, not a cent under.”
George du Cane felt the lifting of a weight from his mind. The deal was evidently off. He had only to put his hand in his pocket, so to say, and fetch out the ten thousand, but the idea of a cruise in the Wear Jack had begun to fill his mind with frank and honest alarm. Besides, he knew that Hank would accept no outside financial help or interference. This was his show, to be engineered and run by himself. Feeling safe, he indulged in a little show off.
“That’s a pity,” said he, “I shouldn’t have minded risking it; besides, we’d have had the whale boat, but I suppose it can’t be helped.”
He spoke without knowledge of the intricacy and subtlety of the rat trap inventor’s mental works.
“I’ve got it,” said Hank, “you can loan her to me.”
Tyrebuck, who seemed suddenly to remember that he had been smoking an unlighted cigar all this time, was in the act of striking a match. He lit the cigar, blew a cloud of smoke and placed the dead match carefully on a tray by the Billikin on his desk. Then he said:
“Well I’m damned, Hank, if you don’t take the cake. You do indeed, you do indeed, you take the cake with the cherry topknot. You come here to me in the temple, so to say, of business propositions—”
“That’s what I’m bringing you,” said Hank. “A business proposition on the hook, warranted sound, free from scab—it’s a buffalo.”
“Trot out your buffalo,” said Tyrebuck.
“Well, it’s this way,” said Hank. “You lend me the Wear Jack. If she busts up and never comes back, you get your insurance, don’t you? If we bring her back with the Dutchman on board, she’s a hero and you have the laugh over the whole waterside. Even if we don’t collar the Dutchman and come back, she’ll have proved herself seaworthy and I’ll give her a certificate all round the town that’ll sell her for you in two hours.”