Billy hated everything that was respectable.  He had hated the smug, self-satisfied merchants of Grand Avenue.  He had writhed in torture at the sight of every shiny, purring automobile that had ever passed him with its load of well-groomed men and women.  A clean, stiff collar was to Billy as a red rag to a bull.  Cleanliness, success, opulence, decency, spelled but one thing to Billy—­physical weakness; and he hated physical weakness.  His idea of indicating strength and manliness lay in displaying as much of brutality and uncouthness as possible.  To assist a woman over a mud hole would have seemed to Billy an acknowledgement of pusillanimity—­to stick out his foot and trip her so that she sprawled full length in it, the hall mark of bluff manliness.  And so he hated, with all the strength of a strong nature, the immaculate, courteous, well-bred man who paced the deck each day smoking a fragrant cigar after his meals.

Inwardly he wondered what the dude was doing on board such a vessel as the Halfmoon, and marveled that so weak a thing dared venture among real men.  Billy’s contempt caused him to notice the passenger more than he would have been ready to admit.  He saw that the man’s face was handsome, but there was an unpleasant shiftiness to his brown eyes; and then, entirely outside of his former reasons for hating him, Billy came to loathe him intuitively, as one who was not to be trusted.  Finally his dislike for the man became an obsession.  He haunted, when discipline permitted, that part of the vessel where he would be most likely to encounter the object of his wrath, hoping, always hoping, that the “dude” would give him some slight pretext for “pushing in his mush,” as Billy would so picturesquely have worded it.

He was loitering about the deck for this purpose one evening when he overheard part of a low-voiced conversation between the object of his wrath and Skipper Simms—­just enough to set him to wondering what was doing, and to show him that whatever it might be it was crooked and that the immaculate passenger and Skipper Simms were both “in on it.”

He questioned “Bony” Sawyer and “Red” Sanders, but neither had nearly as much information as Billy himself, and so the Halfmoon came to Honolulu and lay at anchor some hundred yards from a stanch, trim, white yacht, and none knew, other than the Halfmoon’s officers and her single passenger, the real mission of the harmless-looking little brigantine.

CHAPTER III

THE CONSPIRACY

No shore leave was granted the crew of the Halfmoon while the vessel lay off Honolulu, and deep and ominous were the grumblings of the men.  Only First Officer Ward and the second mate went ashore.  Skipper Simms kept the men busy painting and holystoning as a vent for their pent emotions.

Billy Byrne noticed that the passenger had abandoned his daylight strolls on deck.  In fact he never once left his cabin while the Halfmoon lay at anchor until darkness had fallen; then he would come on deck, often standing for an hour at a time with eyes fastened steadily upon the brave little yacht from the canopied upper deck of which gay laughter and soft music came floating across the still water.