Shank was leaning close to me, unscrewing the wing nuts between the breastplate and my collar-band. He began to swear very soulfully in an undertone, and he kept on swearing when he got a look from me that indorsed all his sentiments in regard to Mr. Keedy.
“There are three millions down there—and twenty thousand is only a flea-bite,” declared the callous knave. I don’t believe he noticed that I was half dead when I was pulled up—or cared a rap about my condition, anyway. “I’m strong for bulling the game when it’s coming your way. What do you say, Sidney, if we make the first day’s ante forty thousand?”
“Captain Holstrom,” I said, “a man who has been banging the soul out of himself for five hours in a divingsuit is in no condition to talk to a skunk like that over there. Can’t you say something?”
I must confess that the captain did rise nobly to the occasion. A tugboat man who has spent most of his life fighting for berths in the maze of shipping along the San Francisco water-front needs considerable hot language in his business, and Captain Holstrom was in good practice.
“So I’ve got the two partners against me now, have I?” snarled Keedy. “I had to fight to get the two of you into the proposition, and now that you’re making good I’ve got to fight both of you to keep the thing going, have I? Thanks for the hint as to how you propose to hold cards—but I serve notice right now that you can’t whipsaw me between you.”
He looked as evil as a door-tender in Tophet, but his threats did not trouble me.
That evening something happened that indicated further cleavage of associations on board the Zizania, whose checker-board crew had set an example early in the cruise.
Ingot Ike came to the captain and myself in the wheel-house.
“Now that we’re beginning to haul in the bright and shining stuff that makes the world go round I’d like to know where I’m going to get off when the divvy comes,” said he. And he was more than a little insolent in the way he said it. It was a good guess that he had absorbed more or less of the insolence of his new running-mate, Marcena Keedy.
Captain Holstrom was pretty short with the man. He informed old Ike that when the work was done and we knew what the profits would be he would be handed a lay which would make him comfortable for life. “That was the understanding between us when we started out on the gamble,” said the captain. “You haven’t got a dollar ahead now—you never did have. A lot of money wouldn’t do you any good, anyway. You don’t know how to keep it or how to spend it.”