"Exactly," Captain Scraggs managed to gasp, as soon as he could recover from his astonishment. "They showed me your name an' address, an' they won't leave th' ship, where I got 'em locked up in my cabin, until you come an' take 'em away. Couple o' relatives of yours, I should imagine."
Gin Seng smiled his bland Chinese smile. He had frequent dealings with ship masters engaged in the dangerous though lucrative trade of smuggling Chinese into the United States, and while he had not received advice of this particular shipment, he decided to go with Captain Scraggs to Jackson Street bulkhead and see if he could not be of some use to his countrymen.
As Captain Scraggs and his Chinese companion approached the wharf the skipper glanced warily about. He had small fear that either Gibney or McGuffey would show up for an hour, for he knew that Mr. Gibney had money in his possession. However, he decided to take no chances, and scouted the vicinity thoroughly before venturing aboard the Maggie. These actions served but to increase the respect of Gin Seng for the master of the Maggie and confirmed him in his belief that the Maggie was a smuggler.
Captain Scraggs took his visitor inside the little cabin, carefully locked and bolted the door, lifted the zinc flap back from the top of the crate of "Oriental goods," and displayed the face of the dead Chinaman. Also he pointed to the Chinese characters on the wooden lid of the crate.
"What does these hen scratches mean?" demanded Scraggs.
"This man is named Ah Ghow and he belongs to the Hop Sing tong."
"How about his pal here?"
"That man is evidently Ng Chong Yip. He is also a Hop Sing man."
Captain Scraggs wrote it down. "All right," he said cheerily; "much obliged. Now, what I want to know is what the Hop Sing tong means by shipping the departed brethren by freight? They go to work an' fix 'em up nice so's they'll keep, packs 'em away in a zinc coffin, inside a nice plain wood box, labels 'em 'Oriental goods,' and consigns 'em to the Gin Seng Company, 714 Dupont Street, San Francisco. Now why are these two countrymen o' yours shipped by freight—where, by the way, they goes astray, for some reason that I don't know nothin' about, an' I buys 'em up at a old horse sale?"
Gin Seng shrugged his shoulders and replied that he didn't understand.