Kettle accepted it all with a dry civility.  He had every expectation of upsetting this man’s plans of robbery later on, and very possibly of coming into personal contact with him.  But the ties of bread and salt did not disturb him.  Though it was Tazzuchi who presented the Virginias and the novels, he took it for granted that Messrs. Bird, Bird and Co. had paid for them, and he was not averse to accepting a little luxury from the firm.  The economical Isaac had cut down the commissariat on the Parakeet till a man had to be half-starved before he could stomach a meal.

The salvage steamer had a South of Europe leisureliness in her movements.  Her utmost pace was nine knots, but, as eight was more economical for coal consumption, it was at that speed she moved.  The wreck of the Grecian was out of the usual steam lane.  She had, it appeared, got off her course in a fog, had run foul of a half-ebb reef which holed her in two compartments, and then been steered for the shore in the wild attempt to beach her before she sank.  She had ceased floating, however, with some suddenness, and when the critical moment came not all of her people managed to scrape off with their lives in the boats.  Those that stayed behind were incontinently drowned; those that got away found themselves in a gale (to which the fog gave place), and had so much trouble to keep afloat that they had no time left to make accurate determination of where their vessel sank; and when they were picked up could only give her whereabouts vaguely.  However, they stated that the Grecian’s mast-trucks remained above the water surface, and by these she could be found; and this fact was brought out strongly by the auctioneer who sold the wreck, and had due influence on the enterprising Alexander.  “Masts!” said Alexander, who daily saw them bristling from a dock, “don’t tell me you can miss masts anywhere.”

But, as it chanced, it was only by a fluke that the salvage steamer stumbled across the wreck at all.  She wandered for several days among an intensely dangerous archipelago, and many times over had narrow escapes from piling up her bones on one or other of those reefs with which the Red Sea in that quarter abounds.  Tazzuchi navigated her in an ecstasy of nervousness, and Kettle (who regarded himself as a passenger for the time being) kept a private store of food and water-bottles handy, and saw that one of the quarter-boats was ready for hurried lowering.  But nowhere did they see those mast-trucks.  They did not sight so much as a scrap of floating wreckage.

There seemed, however, a good many dhow coasters dodging about in and among the reefs, and from these Kettle presently drew a deduction.

“Look here,” he said to Tazzuchi one morning, “what price those gentry ashore having found the wreck already?  I guess they aren’t out here taking week-end trippers for sixpenny yachting cruises.”

“No,” said Tazzuchi, “and they aren’t fishing; you can see that.”