"I'm looking for a change of weather at the full of the moon," remarks Tom, "and you'd be wise to take this good spell while it lasts."
I guess Tom overdid it this time, and I gave him hell for it when we went ashore, for I saw the change on Phelps's face, and that he suddenly suspicioned Tom was playing double.
"Business comes first," he says, rolling up the chart, "and though I would like to find him, just for my poor wife's satisfaction, I can't go wild-goose-chasing all over the Pacific for a woman's whim."
Tom was beginning to feel that he had overdone it, too, and roused more suspicion than he had laid; so he thought to make it up by losing interest in Old Dibs, and what was Fitzsimmons doing now, and was it true that John L. had retired from the ring? But he didn't seem to recover the ground he had lost, and I judged it a bad sign when we went up the companion for Phelps to say, kind of absent-minded, that he'd go two hundred and fifty pounds for his father-in-law, alive or dead—raising it to five hundred as we dropped over the side.
We pulled first to Tom's house, so as to divert suspicion, and from there I went along by myself to tip off the news to Old Dibs. When I had given the knocks agreed on, three sets of four, he drew back the trap, and asked very cheerful how I had made out with the books and papers.
"Good God, man, they're here!" says I.
"Who's here?" he asks, incredulous.
"A whole schooner of detectives from Sydney," says I. "They say they're buying guano islands, but there's already five hundred pounds out for you, dead or alive."
His great fat hand began to shake on the trap.
"Never you mind, Mr. Smith," I says reassuring. "Tom will be due here at midnight, and then we'll run you up your tree."