“And now she’d be the first to feel ashamed of you if she knew.”
Osborne winced.
“What’s the good of digging up the bones of a skeleton that is better buried!” he said impatiently. “The thing to consider is the wreck. If we could buy it we could blow it up.”
“We can blow it up, anyway. That is, if we can get there before the Farquhar crowd. We have steam against their sail, and I’ve made it difficult for them to fit out their boat. Unless I find I can come to terms with the fellows, I’ll get off in the yacht as soon as the ice breaks up.”
“Your crew may talk.”
“They won’t have much to talk about; I’ll see to that. Now, I don’t know what claim insurers have on a vessel they’ve paid for and abandoned for a number of years, but I guess there’s nothing to prevent our trying to recover her cargo, so long as we account for what we get. It’s known that the yacht has been cruising in the North, and what more natural than that we should discover that a gale or a change of current had washed the wreck into shallow water after the salvage expedition gave her up? If there had been anything wrong, we’d have made some move earlier. Very well; knowing more about the vessel and her freight than anybody else, we try what we can do. If we fail, like the salvage people, nobody can blame us.”
“You’d run some risk, for all that,” Osborne said thoughtfully.
“I can’t deny it. If Farquhar and his friends were business men, I’d feel uneasy. He has cards in his hand that would beat us; but he doesn’t know how many trumps he holds. If he did know, we’d have heard from him or the underwriters before this.”
“It seems probable,” Osborne agreed. “All the same, I wish the winter was over and you could get off. It will be a relief to know that she is destroyed.”
“You’ll have to wait; but there won’t be much of her left after we get to work with the giant-powder,” Clay promised cheerfully.