The American listened to the clear enunciation of ideas with a close attention and admiration for the man whose brain could generate such a plausible hypothesis. There were yet, however, links missing from the chain as he saw it, and his first question was in a degree proof of his own shrewdness:
"These clerks, or whatever you call 'em," said he—"who's going to lay them out?"
"That depends on themselves, or on one of them, at any rate," answered Messenger, continuing to write. "You've read from my letters that Capel is in with us to his armpits. I bought him for a quarter share—as between you and me, Kenner—a month ago. He owes a matter of fifty thousand in London, and can't draw back—I've seen to that. He flew at the job almost before I'd opened my lips, and I'd trust him to the end of it. The other's a mere dummy, a numskull, who'll either cave in at the first show of fight or go under for his pains. It's the mate, as I said before, that's like to trouble us; the rest's a mere pleasure cruise."
And the destination?" asked the American.
"Montevideo first, and the blessed shades of the Argentine or Urugaay after."
He wrote out fully the directions he had given, marking the hours most plainly in uncouth if legible capitals, the others waiting for him patiently, though their excitement was palpitating and visible. When he had concluded the whole with a fine flourish, he looked at his watch, and said that he had ten minutes, a reflection which drew from the American the desire to "crack a bottle for luck."
"Which you'll need badly," muttered Burke. "I've no fancy for work begun on Fridays."
Messenger listened to him, a mocking sneer upon his lips.
"Burke," said he, "I've had fine accounts of you; and you're in for the biggest venture of your life. Are you going to play the old woman now?"
"By thunder! that's sense to the kernel," added Kenner. "We're afloat, and Heaven knows when we'll see the shore again——"
"That depends on us all," said Messenger, rising; "but if any man shows false, let him look to himself."
With this he went on deck, to find the gig waiting, and Fisher leaning moodily upon the taffrail. For a moment he made as though to step into the boat without any notice of the lad; but a sudden impulse arrested him, and he took the boy's hand quickly, and spoke to him in a low voice.
"Hal," said he, "I've much to say to you, but this isn't the time. I shall be aboard here again in three days, and then I'll count upon you."
He was gone almost with his words; and while Fisher was yet thinking of them, the Semiramis had weighed anchor, and was standing in toward the river's mouth.
IV. THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE TUG "ADMIRAL"
The rain fell in torrents—pitiless summer rain, which the quivering ground swallowed greedily, and the hurned and seared leaves drank up with unquenchable greed. For a month or more the consuming drought had settled heavily upon the city and the south, leaving to the intolerable sun the green of the earth and the fuller ripeness of the fields; but on that July afternoon the westerly gale had come to lave all things with its refreshing gifts, and to pour upon London that torrent-like draught which alone made life in her streets possible at such a season.
Toward evening the downpour, which had been gathering strength for some hours, burst with a new intensity, sweeping in rivers of water from the higher roofs, and swirling into dust-brown eddies at the choked grating of the sewers. The sky, which had presented a face of leaden cloud since midday, darkened almost as at the touch of night; the air seemed to exude an enervating heaviness; the wind swept from corner to corner, and from nook to nook, bending the younger plants like whips, and scattering the full blossoms from the gardens in showers of perfuming leaves. It was a night, verily, to shame summer—a night breeding thoughts of books and of the blessings of the lemon-tree and the cheapness of ice.
Sydney Capel, standing moodily at his window in the court of Danes Inn, arrived at these reflections, and at more, as the clock struck five, and an aged charwoman condescended to set his tea upon the table, and to make a delightfully vague remark, which served her for all weathers.
"Here's an everning agen," said she; and with that she withdrew as quietly as she had come, and left her special charge to the last meal he would get before setting oat on his long journey—ostensibly to the Russian frontier, in reality to some distant shore of whose situation he was but vaguely conscious.
It has been said by those who saw Capel at this time that he was vastly changed from the man who had taken life so flippantly on the shores of the Mediterranean three months before. His face had lost its colour; his eyes were ringed about with purple hollows; he had a hacking cough, which rarely left him; he had lost much of his old spruceness in dress; he had become blasé and effeminate. Such a change was easy to account for by those who knew the inner pages of his life during those months when Messenger had wound the coils of his rope about him stealthily, until he held him on that day as a vaquero holds quarry in a lasso. It had been a quick fall; but the seeds which breed the tares of life bad been in Capel from his birth, and he proved plastic as clay in the hands of a man who moulded him with all the ready skill of an adventurer and a rogue. On that night the end had come, the parting of the ways—from a career, from friends, from his old world to the paths of danger, of darkness, and of doubt. Had it been possible he would have turned back even then; but the web was too closely woven, the meshes of the net had ensnared him beyond hope.
A clock in the Strand struck the first quarter after five when he turned away from the sight of the relentless rain, and gathered his baggage together with a mechanical effort. He had prepared himself just that outfit which used to serve him on these trips when he took ingots across the Continent, and was fêted in St. Petersburg; but it seemed rather a mockery now to look upon a portmanteau with a dress suit in it, or those other fripperies which were so purely ornamental. Nevertheless they lay there in bulky confusion; and he went to work mechanically, waiting every moment to hear the sound of Messenger's steps upon the stairs and the knock upon bis oak which was the very last he might expect to hear.
As the thing went it was half-past five before Messenger appeared, a smile upon his face and an unusual colour in his cheeks. He was dressed in a short black jacket, with a white vest beneath, and carried no visible equipment, save a light mackintosh, for the long journey before him. But he spoke with an unusual rapidity of utterance, and could not check his uneasiness.
"Well," said he, the moment the door had shut behind him, "you're ready, I see."
"Yes," replied Capel coldly; "I wish to Heaven I were not!"
Messenger looked at him fiercely, but stopped the exclamation upon his lips, and said in a gentler voice:
"I've been young myself; I know the feeling, though I've lost it years since. Have a glass of brandy. Why, man, think of to-morrow!"
"It's just what I'm thinking of," answered Capel. "Tomorrow—and