“Well, this afternoon I went to see some parties that had a charter to offer me.  Foreigners—­every man Jack of them.  Spoke in German, out of politeness to me.  The Lord knows what they would have spoken if I hadn’t been there.  It was bad enough as it was.  But it wasn’t the lingo that got me; it was the voice.  ‘Where have I heard that voice?’ thinks I. And then I remembered.  It was at the Seemannshaus, at Hamburg, one dark night.  ‘You’re a pretty government official,’ I says to myself, sitting quiet all the time, like a cat in the engine-room.  I wouldn’t have taken the job at any rate, owing to that voice, which I have never forgotten, and yet never thought to hear again.  But while the parley voo was still going on, up jumps a man—­the only man I knew there—­name beginning with a K—­don’t quite remember it.  At any rate, up he jumps, and says that that room was no place for me nor yet for him.  Dare say you know the man, if I could remember his name.  Sort of thin, dark man, with a way of carrying his head—­quarter-deck fashion—­as if he was a king or a Hooghly pilot.  Well, we gets up and walks out, proudlike, as if we had been insulted.  But blessed if I knew what it was all about.  ’Who’s that man!’ I asks when we were in the street.  And the other chap turns and makes a mark upon the door, which he rubs out afterwards as if it was a hanging matter.  ‘That’s who that is,’ he says.”

Cartoner turned, and with one finger made an imaginary design on the soft pile of the table-cloth.  Captain Cable looked at it critically, and after a moment’s reflection admitted in an absent voice that his hopes for eternity were exceedingly small.

“You are too much for me,” he said, after a pause.  “You that deal in politics and the like.”

“And the other man’s name is Kosmaroff,” said Cartoner.

“That’s it—­a Russian,” answered Captain Cable, rising, and looking at the clock.  His movements were energetic and very quick for his years.  He carried with him the brisk atmosphere of the sea and the hardness of a life which tightens men’s muscles and teaches them to observe the outward signs of man and nature.

“It beats me,” he said.  “But I’ve told you all I can—­all, perhaps, that you want to hear.  For it seems that you are putting two and two together already.  I think I’ve done right.  At any rate, I’ll stand by it.  It makes me uneasy to think of that stuff having been below the Minnie’s hatches.”

“It makes me uneasy, too,” said Cartoner.  “Wait a minute till I put on another coat.  I am going out.  We may as well go down together.”

He came back a moment later, having changed his coat.  He was attaching the small insignia of a foreign order to the lapel.

“Going to a swarree?” asked Cable, as between men of the world.

“I am going to look for a man I want to see to-night, and I think I shall find him, as you say, at a soiree,” answered Cartoner, gravely.