He looked at his hands, and decided not to pursue the subject.

“You’ll say that for me, Mr. Cartoner—­you that has known me ten years and more.”

“Yes, I’ll say that for you,” answered Cartoner, with a laugh.

“They did me!” cried the captain, leaning forward and banging his hand down on the table, “with the old trick of a bill of lading lost in the post and a man in a gold-laced hat that came aboard one night and said he was a government official from the Arsenal come for his government stuff.  And it wasn’t government stuff, and he wasn’t a government official.  It was——­”

Captain Cable paused and looked carefully round the room.  He even looked up to the ceiling, from a long habit of living beneath deck skylights.

“Bombs!” he concluded—­“bombs!”

Then he went further, and qualified the bombs in terms which need not be set down here.

“You know me and you know the Minnie, Mr. Cartoner!” continued the angry sailor.  “She was specialty built with large hatches for machinery, and—­well, guns.  She was built to carry explosives, and there’s not a man in London will insure her.  Well, we got into the way of carrying war material.  It was only natural, being built for it.  But you’ll bear me out, and there are others to bear me out, that we’ve only carried clean stuff up to now—­plain, honest, fighting stuff for one side or the other.  Always honest—­revolutions and the like, and an open fight.  But bombs——­”

And here again the captain made use of nautical terms which have no place on a polite page.

“There’s bombs about, and it’s me that has been carrying them,” he concluded.  “That is what I have got to tell you.”

“How do you know?” asked Cartoner, in his gentle and soothing way.

The captain settled himself in his chair, and crossed one leg over the other.

“Know the Johannis Bulwark, in Hamburg?”

Cartoner nodded.

“Know the Seemannshaus there?”

“Yes.  The house that stands high up among the trees overlooking the docks.”

“That’s the place,” said Captain Cable.  “Well, one night I was up there, on the terrace in front of the house where the sailors sit and spit all day waiting to be taken on.  Got into Hamburg short-handed.  I was picking up a crew.  Not the right time to do it, you’ll say, after dark, as times go and forecastle hands pan out in these days.  Well, I had my reasons.  You can pick up good men in Hamburg if you go about it the right way.  A man comes up to me.  Remembered me, he said; had sailed with me on a voyage when we had machinery from the Tyne that was too big for us, and we couldn’t get the hatches on.  We sailed after nightfall, I recollect, with hatches off, and had the seas slopping in before the morning.  He remembered it, he said.  And he asked me if it was true that I was goin’—­well, to the port I was bound for.  And I said it was