Now Captain Owen Kettle, once he had taken up this piece of employment, entered into it with a kind of chastened joy.  The Life Insurance Company’s agent had rather sneered at ship-captains as a class (so he considered), and though the man did his best to be outwardly civil, it was plain that he considered a mob of passengers the intellectual superiors of any master mariner.  So Kettle intended to prove himself the “complete detective” out of sheer esprit de corps.

As he had surmised, Messrs. Hamilton and Cranze remained the Flamingo’s only two passengers, and so he considered he might devote full attention to them without being remarkable.  If he had been a steward making sure of his tips he could not have been more solicitous for their welfare; and to say he watched them like a cat is putting the thing feebly.  Any man with an uneasy conscience must have grasped from the very first that the plot had been guessed at, and that this awkward little skipper, with his oppressive civilities, was merely waiting his chance to act as Nemesis.

But either Mr. Cranze had an easy mind, and Lupton had unjustly maligned him, or he was a fellow of the most brazen assurance.  He refused to take the least vestige of a warning.  He came on board with a dozen cases of champagne and four of liqueur brandy as a part of his personal luggage, and his first question to every official he came across was how much he would have to pay per bottle for corkage.

As he made these inquiries from a donkey-man, two deck hands, three mates, a trimmer, the third engineer, two stewards, and Captain Kettle himself, the answers he received were various, and some of them were profane.  He seemed to take a delight in advertising his chronic drunkenness, and between-whiles he made a silly show of the fact that he carried a loaded revolver in his hip pocket.  “Lots fellows do’t now,” he explained.  “Never know who-you-may-meet.  S’ a mos’ useful habit.”

Now Captain Kettle, in his inmost heart, considered that Cranze was nerving himself up with drink to the committal of his horrid deed, and so he took a very natural precaution.  Before they had dropped the Irish coast he had managed to borrow the revolver, unbeknown to its owner, and carefully extracted the powder from the cartridges, replacing the bullets for the sake of appearances.  And as it happened, the chief engineer, who was a married man as well as a humorist, though working independently of his skipper, carried the matter still further.  He, too, got hold of the weapon, and brazed up the breech-block immovably, so that it could not be surreptitiously reloaded.  He said that his wife had instructed him to take no chances, and that meanwhile, as a fool’s pendant, the revolver was as good as ever it had been.