“Leavin’ aside this little bisness, he’s known as a crook from Benicia right to San Jose.  The bay stinks with him and his doin’s; settin’ Chinese sturgeon lines, Captain Mike said he was, and all but nailed, smugglin’ and playin’ up to the Greeks, and worse.  The Bayside’s hungry to catch him an’ stuff him in the penitentiary, and he hasn’t no friends.  I’m no saint, I owns it, but I’m a plaster John the Baptis’ to Ginnell, and I’ve got friends, so have you.  Well, what are you bothering about?”

“Oh, I’m not bothering about the law,” said Blood, “only about him.  I’m going to keep my eye open and not be put asleep by his quiet ways—­and I’d advise you to do the same.”

“Trust me,” said Harman, “and more especial when we come to longsides with the Yan-Shan.”

Now the Yan-Shan had started in life somewhere early in the nineties as a twelve hundred ton cargo boat in the Bullmer line; she had been christened the Robert Bullmer, and her first act when the dog-shores had been knocked away was a bull charge down the launching slip, resulting in the bursting of a hawser, the washing over of a boat and the drowning of two innocent spectators; her next was an attempt to butt the Eddystone over in a fog, and, being unbreakable, she might have succeeded only that she was going dead slow.  She drifted out of the Bullmer line on the wash of a law-suit owing to the ramming by her of a Cape boat in Las Palmas harbour; engaged herself in the fruit trade in the service of the Corona Capuella Syndicate, and got on to the Swimmer rocks with a cargo of Jamaica oranges, a broken screw shaft and a blown-off cylinder cover.  The ruined cargo, salvage and tow smashed the Syndicate, and the Robert Bullmer found new occupations till the See-Yup-See Company of Canton picked her up, and, rechristening, used her for conveying coffins and coolies to the American seaboard.  They had sent her to Valdivia on some business, and on the return from the southern port to ’Frisco she had, true to her instincts and helped by a gale, run on San Juan, a scrap of an island north of the Channel Islands of the California coast.  Every soul had been lost with the exception of two Chinese coolies, who, drifting on a raft, had been picked up and brought to San Francisco.

She had a general cargo and twenty thousand dollars in gold coin on board, but the coolies had declared her to be a total wreck, said, in fact, when they had last sighted her she was going to pieces.

That was the yarn Harman heard through Clancy, with the intimation that the wreck was not worth two dollars, let alone the expenses of a salvage ship.

The story had eaten into Harman’s mind; he knew San Juan better than any man in ’Frisco, and he considered that a ship once ashore there would stick; then Ginnell turned up, and the luminous idea of inducing Ginnell to shanghai Blood so that Blood might with his, Harman’s, assistance shanghai Ginnell and use the Heart of Ireland for the picking of the Yan-Shan’s pocket, entered his mind.