“O, yes; let’s stick to the programme,” I cried. “Honolulu be it!”
There was another silence, and then Nares cleared his throat.
“We’ve been pretty good friends, you and me, Mr. Dodd,” he resumed. “We’ve been going through the kind of thing that tries a man. We’ve had the hardest kind of work, we’ve been badly backed, and now we’re badly beaten. And we’ve fetched through without a word of disagreement. I don’t say this to praise myself: it’s my trade; it’s what I’m paid for, and trained for, and brought up to. But it was another thing for you; it was all new to you; and it did me good to see you stand right up to it and swing right into it—day in, day out. And then see how you’ve taken this disappointment, when everybody knows you must have been tautened up to shying-point! I wish you’d let me tell you, Mr. Dodd, that you’ve stood out mighty manly and handsomely in all this business, and made every one like you and admire you. And I wish you’d let me tell you, besides, that I’ve taken this wreck business as much to heart as you have; something kind of rises in my throat when I think we’re beaten; and if I thought waiting would do it, I would stick on this reef until we starved.”
I tried in vain to thank him for these generous words, but he was beforehand with me in a moment.
“I didn’t bring you ashore to sound my praises,” he interrupted. “We understand one another now, that’s all; and I guess you can trust me. What I wished to speak about is more important, and it’s got to be faced. What are we to do about the Flying Scud and the dime novel?”
“I really have thought nothing about that,” I replied; “but I expect I mean to get at the bottom of it, and if the bogus Captain Trent is to be found on the earth’s surface, I guess I mean to find him.”
“All you’ve got to do is talk,” said Nares; “you can make the biggest kind of boom; it isn’t often the reporters have a chance at such a yarn as this; and I can tell you how it will go. It will go by telegraph, Mr. Dodd; it’ll be telegraphed by the column, and headlined, and frothed up, and denied by authority, and it’ll hit bogus Captain Trent in a Mexican bar-room, and knock over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up the Baltic, and bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors’ music-halls round Greenock. O, there’s no doubt you can have a regular domestic Judgment Day. The only point is whether you deliberately want to.”
“Well,” said I, “I deliberately don’t want one thing: I deliberately don’t want to make a public exhibition of myself and Pinkerton: so moral—smuggling opium; such damned fools—paying fifty thousand for a ‘dead horse’!”
“No doubt it might damage you in a business sense,” the captain agreed; “and I’m pleased you take that view, for I’ve turned kind of soft upon the job. There’s been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, law bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would slip right out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you’d only collar a lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn’t know the back of the business from the front. I don’t take much stock in mercantile Jack, you know that, but, poor devil, he’s got to go where he’s told; and if you make trouble, ten to one it’ll make you sick to see the innocents who have to stand the racket. It would be different if we understood the operation; but we don’t, you see: there’s a lot of queer corners in life, and my vote is to let the blame’ thing lie.”
“You speak as if we had that in our power,” I objected.