Captain Dove's eyes began to kindle. Slyne had succeeded, as usual, in touching him on the raw.
"No more have I," he asserted with a fierce oath. "I've barely enough left to pay the port-dues in Genoa and take my ship through the canal; you know very well, too, that I won't be safe till I see Suez astern. For a few tons of coal and some temporary repairs I'll have to trust to my wits. I'm worse off now than I was when I picked you up in New York, with your precious scheme for making our fortunes in Central America."
The flagrant injustice of that reproach was so obvious that Slyne kept his self-control. "Whose fault was it that you were so soft with Sallie as to let her spoil all our plans?" he asked equably, and did not wait for an answer. "And you're far better off at the finish than I am," said he. "Your foolishness has cost us both our chance of a big haul—but you've still got her."
"I've still got her," the old man admitted, if grudgingly. "That's true. I've still got her. And she'll have to pay pretty high, perhaps, for all she's cost me of late. You wouldn't believe, Slyne, how well I've always treated that girl. I couldn't have done better by her if she had been my own daughter. And I wouldn't have believed she'd ever go back on me as she's done of late."
"You don't know how to handle her at all," Slyne asserted bluntly. "You're getting into your dotage. She's outgrown you. And what'll happen in the end will be that you'll lose her too. You're far too grasping."
Captain Dove shook his hoary head with a cunning grin. "If I don't know how to handle her, there's nothing you can teach me," he commented. "And yet you'd give your very eye-teeth for her!"
"It would be the best bit of business you've done for long," Slyne affirmed. "She's cost you far more already than you'll ever make again, and me, too, for that matter. Look what a hoodoo she's been to us all this trip. We might both have been millionaires at this minute but for her interfering with—"
"Avast there, now!" the old man growled savagely. "Don't keep harping on that string, curse you! I know when I've had enough, too. So just keep your head shut about it. And bear in mind, Slyne, that what I say goes, on the Olive Branch, or—it'll maybe be 'Hobson's choice' for you too before we make Genoa."
Slyne gave him back glance for virulent glance, but kept silence, and showed his wisdom thereby. For Captain Dove, in that frame of mind, might very easily have been moved to some insane act of violence. The old man had never before gone so far as actually to threaten his casual accomplice. And even Slyne, who did not fear death itself, did not desire to die in a more unpleasant manner than need be. He sat quiet, searching his nimble brain for some more soothing speech.
"What makes me so hot," he explained, relaxing his scowl as he held out his empty glass, "is that I haven't the money you want for her. You've no idea, Dove, how well I could do with a wife like that. And now—"