Captain Kettle sat where he was, musing.  He had no fear that Cranze, the ship’s butt and drunkard, would murder his man in broad, staring daylight, especially as, judging from the sounds, others of the ship’s company were at present baiting him.  But he did not see his way to earning that extra L200, which he would very much like to have fingered.  To let this vulgar, drunken ruffian commit some overt act against Hamilton’s life, without doing him actual damage, seemed an impossibility.  He had taken far to great a fancy for Hamilton to allow him to be hurt.  He was beginning to be mystified by the whole thing.  The case was by no means so simple and straightforward as it had looked when Lupton put it to him in the hotel smoking-room ashore.

Had Cranze been any other passenger, he would have stopped his drunken riotings by taking away the drink, and by giving strict orders that the man was to be supplied with no further intoxicants.  But Cranze sober might be dangerous, while Cranze tipsy was merely a figure of ridicule; so he submitted, very much against his grain, to having his ship made into a bear-garden, and anxiously awaited developments.

The Flamingo cleared the south of Florida, sighted the high land of Cuba, and stood across through the Yucatan channel to commence her peddling business in Honduras, and at some twenty ports she came to an anchor six miles off shore, and hooted with her siren till lighters came off through the surf and the shallows.

Machinery they sent ashore at these little-known stations, coal, powder, dress-goods, and pianos, receiving in return a varied assortment of hides, mahogany, dyewoods, and some parcels of ore.  There was a small ferrying business done also between neighboring ports in unclean native passengers, who harbored on the foredeck, and complained of want of deference from the crew.

Hamilton appeared to extract some melancholy pleasure from it all, and Cranze remained unvaryingly drunk.  Cranze passed insults to casual strangers who came on board and did not know his little ways, and the casual strangers (after the custom of their happy country) tried to knife him, but were always knocked over in the nick of time, by some member of the Flamingo’s crew.  Hamilton said there was a special providence which looks after drunkards of Cranze’s type, and declined to interfere; and Cranze said he refused to be chided by a qualified teetotaller, and mixed himself further king’s pegs.

Messrs. Bird, Bird and Co., being of an economical turn of mind, did not fall into the error of overmanning their ships, and so as one of the mates chose to be knocked over by six months’ old malarial fever, Captain Kettle had practically to do a mate’s duty as well as his own.  A mate in the mercantile marine is officially an officer and some fraction of a gentleman, but on tramp steamers and liners where cargo is of more account than passengers—­even when they dine at half-past six, instead of at midday—­a mate has to perform manual labors rather harder than that accomplished by any three regular deck hands.