"Where is the Manila now?"
"She is waiting for me off Mopelia. My men are having a good vacation on the island until I come back."
"I say, Count, we Japanese are not such fools. You had the four-master Manila, and you sailed from Mopelia to the Fijis in a small boat."
"Yes," I replied. "There was not room enough for all of us aboard the Manila."
The admiral looked at me with a sly Oriental smile. Fine, I thought. I had figured out their minds correctly. They had not set straight out for Mopelia, in spite of their knowing that we had landed stores there, because it seemed wildly impossible that I with my five men had sailed from Mopelia to the Fijis in an open boat.
"Count," exclaimed the admiral, "I will tell you where your crew is. You did not leave a four-masted schooner and sail twenty-three hundred miles in a lifeboat. You sailed here in the Manila, and, having got here, you put out in your lifeboat to capture another ship in a near-by harbour. You tell me your crew is at Mopelia, hoping I will get up steam immediately, go hurrying away for a few thousand miles on a wild-goose chase, and leave them in peace. The Manila is in these waters. In four days, your crew will be my prisoners."
He respected me too much to think that I would ever give my crew away. He knew I would try to throw him off the scent. His object was to outwit me, to get my story and read between the lines.
"Very good, Admiral," I thought, "let us see how it will work out."
We parted the best of friends. He was an excellent fellow. Our meeting had been one of mutual deceit with lies that no gentleman would tell in ordinary times. Now they were quite respectable, as ruses of war.
The ironical thing was that my men, who under the command of Lieutenant Kling were still living like lords at Mopelia, were destined to have much better luck in getting a ship than my little party had had through all our terrible hardships.