“By Jove!” ejaculated Purchase. “What a very extraordinary idea!”
“I don’t think so at all,” cut in Hoskins, before Mr Perry could reply. “It may seem so to you, Purchase, because it has just been presented to you, fresh and unexpectedly, as it were. But when we arrived at King Olomba’s town yesterday morning, and found neither slaves nor barracoon there, I must confess that I was visited by some such suspicion as that of which Captain Perry has just been speaking, although in my case it did not take quite such a concrete and connected form. To my mind there is only one thing against your theory, sir,” he continued, turning to the skipper, “and that is the existence of the factory on the lagoon.”
“Yes,” agreed the captain, “I admit that to be somewhat difficult to account for. And yet, perhaps not so very difficult either; because if the fellows who gave Captain Harrison the information upon which he acted happened to have a grudge against the owners of that factory they would naturally be more than glad if, while groping about in search of the imaginary slavers and barracoon, we should stumble upon the real thing and destroy it. All this, however, is mere idle conjecture, which may be either well founded or the opposite; but there is one indisputable fact about this business, which is—unless Mr Purchase is altogether mistaken, which I do not for a moment believe—that the Psyche was last night cut adrift from her anchors and wrecked by somebody who must have a lurking-place in this immediate neighbourhood; and I intend to have a hunt for that somebody to-morrow.”
Chapter Five.
The Battle of the Sand Spit.
As the evening progressed it became evident to me that our new captain had developed a very preoccupied mood; he fell into long fits of abstraction; and often answered very much at random such remarks as happened to be addressed to him. He appeared to be turning over some puzzling matter in his mind; and at length that matter came to the surface and found expression in speech.
“Mr Purchase,” he said, “I have been trying to put two and two together—or, in other words, I have been endeavouring to find an explanation of the puzzle which this business of the wreck of the Psyche presents. I can understand quite clearly that poor Captain Harrison was deliberately deceived and misled by certain persons in Sierra Leone in order that the ship might be cast away. But why here particularly? For if my theory be correct that the supposed decoy schooner actually sailed out of this river with a full cargo of black ivory, there must certainly be a barracoon somewhere close at hand from which she drew her supplies; and the people who planned the destruction of the sloop could scarcely have been so short-sighted as to have overlooked the fact that such a happening would leave us here stranded in close proximity to a slave factory which, presumably, they would be most anxious should remain undiscovered by us. That is the point which I cannot understand; and I have come to the conclusion that my theory with regard to the schooner must be altogether wrong, or there must be something else in the wind—that, in short, the wreck of the sloop is only a part instead of the whole of their plan.”
“But what about the barracoon which you destroyed to-day, sir?” asked Purchase. “Might not that be the place from which those fellows draw their supplies of slaves?”