“Well, you can suit yourself about that, but it’s true enough.  Why in the name of mischief should I want to meddle with the poor beggar?  If you’re thinking of the bit of a scrap we had yesterday, I’ll own I was full at the time.  And so must he have been.  At least I don’t know why else he should have set upon me like he did.  At any rate that’s not a thing a man would want to murder him for.”

“No, I should say L20,000 is more in your line.”

“What are you driving at?”

“You know quite well.  You got that poor fellow insured just before this trip, you got him to make a will in your favor, and now you’ve committed a dirty, clumsy murder just to finger the dollars.”

Cranze broke into uncanny hysterical laughter.  “That chap insured; that chap make a will in my favor?  Why, he hadn’t a penny.  It was me that paid for his passage.  I’d been on the tear a bit, and the Jew fellow I went to about raising the wind did say something about insuring, I know, and made me sign a lot of law papers.  They made out I was in such a chippy state of health that they’d not let me have any more money unless I came on some beastly dull sea voyage to recruit a bit, and one of the conditions was that one of the boys was to come along too and look after me.”

“You’ll look pretty foolish when you tell that thin tale to a jury.”

“Then let me put something else on to the back of it.  I’m not Cranze at all.  I’m Hamilton.  I’ve been in the papers a good deal just recently, because I’d been flinging my money around, and I didn’t want to get stared at on board here.  So Cranze and I swapped names, just to confuse people.  It seems to have worked very well.”

“Yes,” said Kettle, “it’s worked so well that I don’t think you’ll get a jury to believe that either.  As you don’t seem inclined to make a clean breast of it, you can now retire to your room, and be restored to your personal comforts.  I can’t hand you over to the police without inconvenience to myself till we get to New Orleans, so I shall keep you in irons till we reach there.  Steward—­where’s a steward?  Ah, here you are.  See this man is kept in his room, and see he has no more liquor.  I make you responsible for him.”

“Yes, sir,” said the steward.

Continuously the dividends of Bird, Bird and Co. outweighed every other consideration, and the Flamingo dodged on with her halting voyage.  At the first place he put in at, Kettle sent off an extravagant cablegram of recent happenings to the representative of the Insurance Company in England.  It was not the cotton season, and the Texan ports yielded the steamer little, but she had a ton or so of cargo for almost every one of them, and she delivered it with neatness, and clamored for cargo in return.  She was “working up a connection.”  She swung round the Gulf till she came to where logs borne by the Mississippi stick out from the white sand, and she wasted a little time, and steamed past the nearest outlet of the delta, because Captain Kettle did not personally know its pilotage.  He was getting a very safe and cautious navigator in these latter days of his prosperity.