Lazar smiled in his cold way, but Phil thought the ensign did not seem overjoyed to renew the acquaintance.
“So Lazar has known this scoundrel before,” thought Phil. “I wonder how much he knows of him.”
The thought was answered soon enough, and in a way that showed Lazar in his true character.
Phil had gone below to his room and was writing his weekly letter home, which of late his new and eventful life had caused him to neglect.
He was seated at his desk under the ventilator shaft, which brought fresh air from above. It opened into one of the numerous ventilator-cowls on the quarter-deck.
He could hear indistinctly above him the voices of two men, pacing the quarter-deck, but they did not disturb him until they stopped directly over his ventilator shaft, and he recognized at once the voices of Lazar and the vice-consul.
“So your precious conscience hurts you, does it?” the vice-consul was saying.
“It’s not a question of that,” Lazar’s voice answered, “and you know it, Juarez. But smuggling is too risky. I had a narrow escape from detection in New York a year ago, getting your goods ashore, and I don’t wish to go through that worry again.”
“You made a handsome sum out of it, didn’t you?” Juarez’s voice questioned.
“Not so loud,” Lazar cautioned, “it’s too dangerous; if this were known, I’d lose my commission.”