‘What has Hemmeridge to say about this business of Crabb, do you know?’ I asked.
‘You will keep the news to yourself, if you please,’ he answered; ‘but I don’t mind telling you that he’s under arrest—that is to say, he has to consider himself so.’
‘What for?’ I asked, greatly astonished.
‘Why, Mr. Dugdale,’ said he, slowly looking round, to make sure that the coast was clear, ‘you may easily guess that this business of the scoundrel Crabb—an old pirate, as I remember telling you, signifies a very deep-laid plot, an atrociously ingenious conspiracy.’
‘I supposed that at once,’ said I.
‘The fellow Crabb feigned to be dead,’ he continued. ‘A sham it must have been, otherwise he wouldn’t be in irons yonder. Now, are we to believe that Hemmeridge can’t distinguish between death and life? He reports the man dead to the captain. The fellow is stitched up; but, as we have since ascertained, a prepared hammock is substituted for the one that conceals his remains, and we bury maybe some clump of wood. This is the part Captain Keeling least likes, I think. He is a pious old gentleman, and his horror when’—— He checked himself with a cough, and a sound on top of it like a smothered laugh, as though he enjoyed some fancy in his mind, but durst not be too candid, since it was the captain he talked about.
‘It is assumed,’ said I, ‘that Hemmeridge represented Crabb as dead knowing him to be alive?’ He nodded. ‘What will have been the project?’ I continued, shaping out the truth as, bit by bit, it formed itself in my head. ‘Robbery, of course. Ay, Mr. Prance, that will have been it. Crabb is to be smuggled into the hold, the notion throughout the ship being that he is dead and overboard; and when in the hold’—— I stopped.
‘Well,’ said he with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘there’s the mail-room. What else? With a parcel of diamonds in it worth seventy thousand pounds, not to speak of money, jewelry, and other precious matters.’
‘By heavens! did any man ever hear the like of such a plot?’ cried I; ‘and Hemmeridge is suspected as a confederate?’
‘We shall see, we shall see,’ he answered.