“Come with me, Timothy,” said I to McShanus. “Don’t talk about pistols, men. Larry will stand by for danger. We could sink them in five minutes if we had the mind—it’s as safe as Rotten Row.”
“No safe place at all for a man who is susceptible to woman’s beauty. Go aboard, Ean, me bhoy, I’ll take your word for it when I come back.”
We put out a gangway and lowered the lifeboat from the starboard davits. The collier, lying some two hundred paces from our bows, let down a pilot’s ladder for me, and I caught it as it fell, and climbed to her decks. Far down below me now, the portly Timothy asked me if I thought he was a bird. I left him, full of strange oaths, in the boat, and presented myself immediately to the captain of the steamer.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
He shook his head and said “Nitchevo” emphatically.
A phrase in German, however, obtained an immediate answer. I perceived him to be a coarsely built man of some fifty years of age, his nose scarred roughly by a seaman’s needle, as the quartermaster Cain had told me, and his manner as threatening and full of bluster as his master the Jew could have wished.
“What’s your business with me?” he asked—while his clumsy fingers fondled a revolver he carried in his breeches pocket.
“To keep your neck out of the noose,” said I, without any preface whatever. “Your game is up and Val Imroth taken. That’s what brought me here.”
He spat on the deck and called a mate to him—another Russian no more beautiful than he. For a few moments they conversed together in a dialect I could make nothing of. It was plain that while my story astounded them beyond measure, they were by no means ready to believe it. And so they fell to bluff, which would not have deceived a child.
“What’s this man to me?” the Captain asked; “am I his servant?”