"You know you're pleasing the owner you sail for, or you wouldn't dare do this thing," choked the young bank president.
The prisoner was speedily taken below.
Gaston Giddings stamped angrily aft, while Joseph Baldwin's eyes followed the young man with a wondering look.
"Mr. Perkins," directed Tom, when Ab came back on deck, "lock the door of the passage leading to the brig, and leave the key with the watch officer, with instructions to turn it over to his successor on the bridge." Tom's order was given for the purpose of preventing Giddings from making any attempt to reach and aid Cragthorpe.
"I'm going to have Doc Gray try to find out what part Cragthorpe has been playing in the life of our young friend, Giddings," Mr. Baldwin confided to the young skipper. "I've a suspicion, already, though."
"May I ask, sir, what you suspect?"
"Well, since Giddings has become a confirmed 'hop-fiend,' and Cragthorpe comes to us from the Rollings crowd, I think it most likely that Rollings has been employing Cragthorpe to cultivate Giddings's acquaintance and lure him on into the opium habit. Such drugs destroy a man's will, his sense of justice—they rot his very soul!"
"So, then, sir, you think Rollings has been, for some time, engaged in a deliberate plot to acquire an ascendancy over Mr. Giddings and ruin him?"
"That's my suspicion, stated in a few words, Captain."