"No one allowed to come aboard," I reminded Ellis, who happened to be the quartermaster at the time. He waved off the boat, but the Arab forced the boatman to bring it closer, and as I saw him more clearly I gasped with amazement, for I had seen him before; he was the sheikh who had commanded the caravan we had captured—the red-bearded man to whose wounded son I had given water. There could be no possible mistake. His beard was not dyed now, but once having seen this man Jassim—-if it was Jassim—there was no forgetting him.
To meet him under these conditions was startling, to say the least of it, and I was quite thrown off my balance. To gain time I told Jaffa to ask him what he wanted.
A long conversation followed, and then Jaffa said: "Say he want very great talk—-must have very great talk."
In my own opinion it would have been better to let him come aboard, have the matter out once and for all, and hear what he proposed doing; but the door of the cabin overhead slid back and Mr. Scarlett whispered through the screen: "For God's sake, sir, send him away; don't let him come near me."
So, as my head really was rather dizzy with my discovery, I sent him away, and back he went, never moving a muscle of his face to show that he was disappointed.
I certainly was disappointed; one doesn't meet such people every day, and I should have liked to find out whether his son was alive. One thing, only, I determined on—not to let Mr. Scarlett know that it was his caravan of rifles we had captured, because I knew this would only add to his fright and his fear of impending calamity.
That afternoon a letter was brought off addressed in sprawling letters to the "Officer with black beard, His Britannic Majesty's ship, Bunder Abbas."
The quartermaster brought it to me and I took it up to Mr. Scarlett, who seized it with trembling fingers and tore it open. Presently he called me to come to him.
"I've translated it, sir. He wants the snake; he offers me five thousand rupees if only I will let him take it off my arm. He says he does not want to do me any harm, but that he is desperately hard up and must and will have it. It's really a threat, sir," he said, his hands trembling violently.
I guessed why he was so desperately "hard up", though I did not tell Mr. Scarlett, but spent the whole day trying to argue with the poor chap, going over the same old arguments which Baron Popple Opstein and I had used so often—with the added inducement of his now being able to make money by getting rid of the snake.