Don Juan kicked the launch back fifty feet. “That will do!” the voice called again.
“Hello!” Billy soliloquized. “That's Jack Webster's voice. I've heard him bossing a gang of miners too often not to recognize that note of command. Wonder what he's up to. I thought he acted strangely—preferring medicine to me the minute I hailed him!”
While he was considering the matter, a voice behind him said very softly and indistinctly, like a man with a harelip:
“Mr. Geary, will you be good enough to back your launch a couple of hundred feet? When I'm certain I can't be seen from the steamer, I'll come aboard.” Billy turned, and in the dim light of his binnacle lamp observed a beautiful pair of white hands grasping the gunwale on the starboard quarter. He peered over and made out the head and shoulders of a man.
“All right,” he replied in a low voice. “Hang where you are, and you'll be clear of the propeller.”
He signalled Don Juan, who backed swiftly away, while Billy doused the binnacle lamp.
“That'll do,” the thick voice said presently. “Bear a hand, friend, and I'll climb over.”
He came, as naked as Mercury, sprawled on his belly in the cockpit, opened his mouth, spat out a compact little roll of tinfoil, opened it and drew out a ball of paper which he flattened out on the floor of the cockpit and handed up to Billy.
“Thank you,” he said, very courteously and distinctly now. “My credentials, Mr. Geary, if you please.”
Billy re-lighted the lamp and read: