“How? Tell me how you'd steal her back.”
“What's the use?” Matt replied wearily. “I'd have to have help. So will Mike—and I've just remembered Mike Murphy and Terence Reardon are the wrong kind of Irish to have together in the same ship. We did our best to prevent it, but the odds are too long for us; the coal is for the Germans and we hate England, so why worry? I know Mike Murphy will not take that view of it; for my sake he'll fight to the last gasp, but he must have help, and Reardon owes me no such allegiance as Murphy.”
“Well, he owes me something,” Cappy spoke up. “You promised him a hundred and seventy-five dollars a month and I raised the ante to two hundred. It was an investment, pure and simple. I was buying loyalty, and by the Holy Pink-Toed Prophet, I think I'll get it. Come to think of it, there was a look in Reardon's eyes that I liked, when he took my hand in those greasy paws of his and said he was a proud man to work for me. Matt, that fellow is full of bellicose veins. He may not fight for me, but he'll fight for Mrs. Reardon and the children and that two-hundred-dollar-a-month job, for it's the first he's ever had and if he loses out it'll be the last he'll ever get. He was telling me all about his family and how much the job meant to him, that day we had the Narcissus out on her trial trip.”
Matt Peasley's face brightened. “By Jupiter, that puts a different face on the situation. If Reardon is alive they might get together for mutual protection.”
“Well,” Cappy piped up, greatly relieved to discover Matt was facing the tragedy so optimistically, “we might do worse than hope. Wire the State Department, Matt; and in the meanwhile, cheer up, sonny, and trust in the luck of Alden P. Ricks. I remember Captain Noah Kendall—peace to his ashes—used to say to me: 'Mr. Ricks, if you ever fell into Channel Creek at low tide you'd come up with a pearl necklace wrapped round your ankle, and you'd be smelling like a spray of lemon verbena.' Cheer up, Matt! What though the cause be lost, the Narcissus is not lost—yet. The Celtic troops remain, and from now on my war cry is going to be—”
“Ireland uber Alles,” Matt Peasley suggested.
“You're blamed whistlin'!” said Cappy Ricks.
So Mr. Skinner was called into consultation, and he and Matt Peasley and Cappy drew up a heart-rending telegram to the Secretary of State, who consulted with the Secretary of the Navy, who wired the Blue Star Navigation Company that he was sorry but he didn't have as much as a rowboat in the South Atlantic to save their steamer Narcissus, and would they please keep still about it, since a noise like that, unless absolutely based on facts—and he understood their wail to be based on suspicion—would tend to create additional friction in an international complication already strained to the breaking point. Whereupon Cappy Ricks flew into a rage and immediately dictated a long letter to his congressman and his senator, urging them to battle to the last trench in the campaign for a two-power navy.
Time passed. Then suddenly the world rocked with the news of the annihilation of the German Pacific fleet off the Falkland Islands. Cappy Ricks and Matt Peasley read the horrid tale in the morning papers as they sat at breakfast, and immediately both lost all interest in food. Like two mourners about to set out for the morgue to identify the corpse of a loved one recently killed by a taxicab, they drove down to the Blue Star offices, where immediately upon arrival something terrible in Mr. Skinner's face brought on palpitation of Cappy Ricks' heart.
“Skinner, my dear boy,” he chattered, “Have you any news?”