"That's easy. I heard Whit and Phinuit talking about you the other night, on deck, when they didn't think anybody was listening."
Lanyard smiled into the darkness: no need to fret about fair play toward this one! The truth was not in him, and by the same token the traditional honour that obtains among thieves could not be.
He said, as if content, in the manner of a practical man dismissing all immaterial considerations:
"As you say, the time is brief..."
"It'll have to be pulled off to-morrow night or not at all," the mutter urged with an eager accent.
"My thought, precisely. For then we come to land, do we not?"
"Yes, and it'll have to be not long after dark. We ought to drop the hook at midnight. Then"--the mutter was broken with hopeful anxiety--"then you've decided you'll stand in with me, Mr. Lanyard?"
"But of course! What else can one do? As you have so fairly pointed out: what is either of us without the other?"
"And it's understood: you're to lift the stuff, I'm to take care of it till we can slip ashore, we're to make our getaway together--and the split's to be fifty-fifty, fair and square?"
"I ask nothing better."