“Charley Tong Sin? Well, rather. A smart chap, that.”
“Yes, very. I wish I could keep my razor as sharp.”
Captain O’Shea next visited a ship-chandler’s and submitted his list of stores, making it a condition of payment that the stuff should be in the steamer before sunset. The elderly German who served him had the tact and discretion bred of long experience with the seafarers of the unexpected Orient. It was his business to sell them whatever they might want, to take his profit and ask no questions. Yes, he could find thirty service rifles and revolvers, also cutlasses of the best steel. They were of patterns discarded by a certain European government, but excellent weapons. He would be glad to sell the captain one, five, or ten thousand of them. The captain was not a man to wag a foolish tongue; one could see it at a glance.
“You and I might do business some day,” quoth O’Shea, “but I am too busy to start a revolution at present.”
He sent a note to Paddy Blake asking him to find a dozen Chinese firemen and sailors and a river pilot, and to muster them ready for signing articles in the afternoon. He believed the old Irishman to be a ripened scoundrel at his own trade, but suspected him of no complicity in the manœuvres of Charley Tong Sin. The comprador had merely used Paddy Blake as a means of making the acquaintance of Captain O’Shea.
Five minutes after noon the shipmaster (he had taken a decided dislike to riding in ’rickshaws) trudged into the headquarters building of Inspector Burke.
“I have a choice collection for you to look over,” said the latter. “They are waiting in another room, and I should call them a worried lot. I sent my men out to pick them up, do you see, and they have not been told the reason why.”
“I cannot afford to be particular, Inspector Burke. Let me at them and I will see whether I am safer ashore among the Chinese or at sea with your exhibit of beach-combers.”
“Oh, they are not as bad as that,” the inspector assured him. “I should scarcely call them desperate characters. However, while I wish you the best of luck, old chap, I shall shed never a tear if you lose your shipmates somewhere beyond Shanghai. Let us call them soldiers of misfortune, if you like.”
He led the way into the large drill-room, where a score or more of men stood in uneasy attitudes and appeared not at all comfortable in this environment. O’Shea let his glance rove in swift, appraising scrutiny and smiled to himself as he recognized one familiar type after another. He had recruited such men as these for unostentatious ventures in the waters of the Spanish Main. Here was the red-faced, burly shipmaster ready with a glib speech and fluent curses to explain how he happened to be without his papers; the shambling ne’er-do-well with the slack mouth and the weak chin who had fled from a scrape at home to lose himself in foreign ports; the tanned adventurer, brave and resourceful, who was fit for nothing else than the life of a rover; the battered old seaman, worn out by the hardships of the forecastle, who had been cast adrift from the hospital; the cashiered army officer with the hall-mark of his caste blurred but still visible; the sharp-featured young man with the furtive eye who lived by his wits and found it very hard living indeed; the bleary tropical tramp who would sell his soul for a drink of brandy.