"The sun never sets, you know," responded Wrenmarsh, with his extraordinary ventral chuckle. "The truth is they won't do. Korfu and Cyprus would be as bad for me as Naples, on account of my reputation. I'm known to have run out a lot of things, you see. Gibraltar or Malta would suit me well enough—if it weren't for the same reason. There isn't a hotel on the entire shores of the Mediterranean that I could put up at with those boxes in safety."
"I hardly suppose I'm expected to take that too literally," Jack said, with a smile.
He reflected a moment. He could see that the collector certainly had good reason for wishing to remain on the yacht, and that it could not but be of very great convenience to him to be taken to England. He was no less convinced from what Jerry had told him that the antiquities which the archæologist had on board must be worth thousands of pounds, and that their possessor could afford to pay well for their safety. He was thoroughly stirred up, moreover, by the thought of the episode of the night before. That Jerry should have been put in actual peril of his life by Wrenmarsh for his own purposes was to Jack so outrageous that he was half tempted to order the collector and his boxes off the Merle at once to take his chances with the officials on the quays of Naples. As Jerry had planned reprisals along another line, however, and as after all Jack could not have brought himself to desert a man in extremity, the captain determined to go on as they had begun.
"Two hundred pounds strikes me as fair enough," he said.
"Too much—too much! Make it fifty," responded Wrenmarsh.
"Two hundred!" repeated Jack.
"I'm sorry; I can't do that," the collector said, with a great show of decision. "You'll have to take me to Malta. What'll you do that for?"
"Three hundred," Jack returned quietly, although he could not refrain from a secret exchange of glances with Jerry.
"What!" the other cried, in an exaggerated shriek. "A run like that? Three hundred pounds! It's not a twentieth the distance to England."