“It’s the ship’s money,” he returned, doggedly continuing his work.
“The ship’s money?” I repeated. “That’s the money Trent tramped and traded with? And there’s his cheque-book to draw upon his owners? And he has left it?”
“I guess he has,” said Nares austerely, jotting down a note of the gold; and I was abashed into silence till his task should be completed.
It came, I think, to three hundred and seventy-eight pounds sterling; some nineteen pounds of it in silver: all of which we turned again into the chest.
“And what do you think of that?” I asked.
“Mr. Dodd,” he replied, “you see something of the rumness of this job, but not the whole. The specie bothers you, but what gets me is the papers. Are you aware that the master of a ship has charge of all the cash in hand, pays the men advances, receives freight and passage-money, and runs up bills in every port? All this he does as the owner’s confidential agent, and his integrity is proved by his receipted bills. I tell you, the captain of a ship is more likely to forget his pants than these bills which guarantee his character. I’ve known men drown to save them—bad men, too; but this is the shipmaster’s honour. And here this Captain Trent—not hurried, not threatened with anything but a free passage in a British man-of-war—has left them all behind. I don’t want to express myself too strongly, because the facts appear against me, but the thing is impossible.”
Dinner came to us not long after, and we ate it on deck, in a grim silence, each privately racking his brain for some solution of the mysteries. I was, indeed, so swallowed up in these considerations that the wreck, the lagoon, the islets, and the strident sea-fowl, the strong sun then beating on my head, and even the gloomy countenance of the captain at my elbow, all vanished from the field of consciousness. My mind was a blackboard on which I scrawled and blotted out hypotheses, comparing each with the pictorial records in my memory—ciphering with pictures. In the course of this tense mental exercise I recalled and studied the faces of one memorial masterpiece, the scene of the saloon; and here I found myself, on a sudden, looking in the eyes of the Kanaka.
“There’s one thing I can put beyond doubt, at all events,” I cried, relinquishing my dinner and getting briskly afoot. “There was that Kanaka I saw in the bar with Captain Trent, the fellow the newspapers and ship’s articles made out to be a Chinaman. I mean to rout his quarters out and settle that.”
“All right,” said Nares. “I’ll lazy off a bit longer, Mr. Dodd; I feel pretty rocky and mean.”
We had thoroughly cleared out the three after-compartments of the ship; all the stuff from the main cabin and the mate’s and captain’s quarters lay piled about the wheel; but in the forward state-room with the two bunks, where Nares had said the mate and cook most likely berthed, we had as yet done nothing. Thither I went. It was very bare; a few photographs were tacked on the bulkhead, one of them indecent; a single chest stood open, and, like all we had yet found, it had been partly rifled. An armful of two-shilling novels proved to me beyond a doubt it was a European’s; no Chinaman would have possessed any, and the most literate Kanaka conceivable in a ship’s galley was not likely to have gone beyond one. It was plain, then, that the cook had not berthed aft, and I must look elsewhere.