"An idea of my own," he answered slowly.
"But—you're surely not going to murder him in his bed now!" he added. Case-hardened and unscrupulous though he might be, he had not yet got so far as to contemplate without a seasick qualm the idea of killing any man in cold blood.
He threw himself down on the settee in the malodorous little saloon.
"I'm tired to death of you and your butcher's methods!" said he, regardless of consequences. "Have you no conscience at all?"
Captain Dove, blinking balefully at him from out of weak, red-rimmed eyes, showed all his tobacco-stained fangs: but in an unexpected smile instead of a snarl. The old man was evidently in a much better temper now that he had turned the tables so neatly on nearly all of those who had thought him utterly in their power. It seemed to amuse him to hear Jasper Slyne in the rôle of mentor.
"None at all," he answered amiably. "And—how about you?"
"You can leave me out of your reckoning after this," Slyne declared, the more morose since he knew very well what good grounds the other had for that taunt. "I'm going ashore just as soon as we get to Genoa, and you'll never set eyes on me again. I know when I've had enough—and I've had enough now."
"Not you," Captain Dove contradicted him blandly. "Say when." He had whisked a bottle of champagne out from a locker under the settee, knocked its wired head neatly off on the table-edge, and was pouring the creamy wine out into a glass, with hospitable but steady hand. When the glass was full he stopped, but not till then, since Slyne had said nothing.
He filled another for himself, and drank its contents off in a couple of gulps, produced a box of cigars, and lighted one clumsily. Slyne followed his example in both respects, but more deliberately, and the heady liquor was not without its prompt effect on him.
"What I mean, Dove," said he presently in that grandiose, patronising manner which always rubbed Captain Dove the wrong way, "what I mean is that I've had far more than enough of this rough-and-tumble work. It isn't the sort of sport at all that appeals to a gentleman. And, what's more, I haven't made a penny out of it all."