The cook had recourse to a large bandanna handkerchief to mop away his perspiration.
"If you mean the stowaway, sir, Hi met 'im just before we reached Los Angeles."
"How many of the crew are with him in this mutiny?"
"Mutiny, sir?"
"I don't mince words. How many?"
"There you 'ave me, sir. S'elp me, Captain Blythe, Hi'm not in 'is confidence."
The man's painful assumption of innocence would have been pathetic had it not been ridiculous.
"I know that," retorted my friend contemptuously. "He'll use you and chuck you aside, dead or alive, whichever is most convenient. Bothwell would as soon knife his fat friend as wink. But that's not the point just now. You'll—tell—me—all—you—know—about—this—affair—at—once. Understand?"
Higgins wriggled like a trout on the hook, but he had to tell what he knew. In point of fact this was not much more than we had already learned.
"You will go back to Bothwell and tell him to start the band playing just as soon as he has his program arranged. Tell him we don't care a jackstraw for his mutiny, and that if he lives through it we'll take him in irons to Panama and have him hanged as high as Haman. Get that, my man?" demanded Blythe.