“Not a bit of it.  I’m not the sort of boy to chuck civility away on an incompetent man.  Now look here, Captain.  We’re on for making a big pile in a very short time, and you can stand in to finger your share if you’ll, only take your whack of the work.”

“There’s no man living more capable of hard work than me, sir, and no man keener to make a competence.  I’ve got a wife that I’d like to see a lot better off than I’ve ever been able to make her so far.”

“I’m sure Mrs. Kettle deserves affluence, and please the pigs she shall have it.”

“But it isn’t every sovereign that might be put in her way,” said the sailor meaningly, “that Mrs. Kettle would care to use.”

“I guess I find every sovereign that comes to my fingers contains twenty useful shillings.”

“I will take your word for it, sir.  Mrs. Kettle prefers to know that the few she handles are cleanly come by.”

Mr. White gritted his handsome teeth, shrugged his shoulders, and made as if he intended to go down off the bridge.  But Sheriff stopped him.  “We’d better have it out,” Sheriff suggested; “as well now as later.”

“Put it in your own words, then.  I don’t seem able to get started.  You,” he added significantly, “know as well as I do what to say.”

“Very well.  Now, look here, Kettle.  This mystery game has gone on long enough, and you’ve got to be put on the ground floor, like the rest of us.  Did you ever dabble in stocks?”

“No, sir.”

“But you know what they are?”

“I’ve heard the minister I sit under ashore give his opinion from the pulpit on the Stock Exchange, and those who do business there.  The minister of our chapel, sir, is a man I always agree with.”

This was sufficiently unpromising, but Sheriff went doggedly on.  “I see your way of looking at it:  the whole crowd of stock operators are a gang of thieves that no decent man would care to touch?”

“That’s much my notion.”

“And they are quite unworthy of protection?”

“They can rob one another to their heart’s content for all I care.”

Sheriff smiled grimly.  “That’s what I wanted to hear you say, Captain.  This cruise we are on now is not exactly a pleasure trip.”

“I guessed that, of course, from the pay that was offered.”

“What we are after is this:  the Cape to England telegraph cable stops at several places on the road, and we want to get hold of one of the stations and work it for our own purposes for an hour or so.  If we can do that, our partners in London will bring off a speculation in South African shares that will set the whole lot of us up for life.”

“And who pays the piper?  I mean where will the money for your profit come from?”

White was quicker than Sheriff to grasp the situation.  “From inside the four walls of the Stock Exchange.  S’elp me, Captain, you needn’t pity them.  There are lots of men there, my friends too, who would have played the game themselves if they had been sharp enough to think of it.  We have to be pretty keen in the speculation business if we want to make money out of it.”