Sea Plunder. H. De Vere Stacpoole

don’t know anything; we are only obeying the orders of the owners. Not that that will have much weight if we are caught, but we’re not going to be. I’ve a firm belief in that slippery eel of a Shiner, much as I dislike him; and this chap Wolff doesn’t seem a fool, either. They’re not the sort of fellows to run their skins into much danger.”

      “What do you think it is?” asked Harman.

      “Think what is?”

      “This game of theirs.”

      “Well, I’ll tell you what I think. I think they are going to pick up a cable, cut it, and tap it.”

      “Whatcha mean by tapping it?”

      “Sucking the news out of it. Or maybe they’re going to use it for sending some lying message that’ll upset the stock markets, or grain markets, or railway people. Lord bless you, there’s a hundred things to be done if one has the business end of a real deep-sea cable with a big city like Frisco or maybe Sydney at the other end.”

      “Well, maybe there is,” said Harman. “There’s a good many things to be done in Frisco off the square, without a cable, and there’s no sayin’ what mightn’t be done with one.”

      “I reckon you’re a judge of that,” laughed the Captain.

      “Oh, I’m pretty well up to the tricks of Frisco,” said the other complacently. “But this is a new traverse, fooling folk from the middle of the ocean, one might say. I reckon Wolff is a German, ain’t he?”

      “Yes, he’s a Dutchman, all right; so’s Shiner, I reckon. German Jew. It lands me how those sort of chaps get on and make money, and the likes of us has to take their orders and their leavings. I’d like to get even with them once.”

      “Well, maybe you will,” said Harman.

      The Captain grunted.

      There was a fellow on board named Bowers. He had been given the post of bos’n, and he knew something of navigation and could keep a watch on the bridge.

      The Captain called for him now and gave the bridge over to him, as all was plain sailing with the California coast away on the port quarter, the Farallons on the starboard bow, and the whole blue Pacific Ocean right ahead.

      He and Harman, leaving the bridge, sought the chart room and went in there for a smoke. It was a pleasant place, full of light, and with a couch running along one side. By the door stood a rack of rifles, eight in number, and for every rifle a cutlass.

      Cable ships go armed. They never know, when they leave port to do a job, what new job may not suddenly call them to the Patagonian beaches or the fogs of the Yellow Sea. The rifles and cutlasses were part of the fixtures belonging to the Penguin and taken over by the new owners, just as fixtures are taken over with a house. To use them for their proper purpose could never have occurred to the minds of Shiner, Wolff & Co. They were not men of violence. The strange thing, indeed, about this expedition, organised and manned for lawless work on the deep sea, was the fact that the chiefs were, to use Harman’s phrase, “sure-enough city men,” and that they were even now down below dead sick with the Pacific’s first fringe of swell.

      Harman took a rifle down and examined it, while Blood, extending his leg on the couch, lit a pipe.

      “Say,” said Harman, “are you any good as a shot?”

      “Not with a thing like that,” replied the Captain. “I can hit a man with a revolver at ten paces, and that’s all the good shooting I want. Put that thing down and don’t be fooling with it.”

      “It’s not loaded,” replied Harman, who had opened the breech.

      “And it’s not likely to be,” replied the other, “for there’s no ammunition on board and no need for it. If we’re caught, there must be no fighting.”

      “Why, I thought you was a fighting man,” said Harman, putting the rifle back. “You have the name for it.”

      “And so I am, when fighting is to be had on the square; but there’s fighting and fighting. Can’t you see, if we were caught tinkering at some cable we had no right to be meddling with, and if we were chased by some gunboat, and if we were to fight and draw blood—can’t you see we’d be hanged without benefit of clergy? No, I never fight against the law. Never have and never will.”

      “Suppose a cruiser overhauled her when we was at work?” said Harman.

      “Well, what’s easier to say than that we were sent to mend? We are a sure-enough cable ship, and how’s a cruiser to know whether the cable we are fishing for or tinkering with isn’t broken? Oh, no; you may make your mind easy on that. Our position is sound and safe, on the outside. Inside it’s as rotten as punk.”