“God only knows!” I replied, with fervor.  “I don’t, McCann.”

The chief was satisfied.  He went back into the cabin, and Mr. Cooke, in the exuberance of his joy, produced champagne.  McCann had heard of my client and of his luxurious country place, and moreover it was the first time he had ever been on a yellow-plush yacht.  He tarried.  He drank Mr. Cooke’s health and looked around him in wonder and awe, and his remarks were worthy of record.  These sayings and the thought of the author of The Sybarites stifling below with his mouth to an auger-hole kept us in a continual state of merriment.  And at last our visitor rose to go.

As he was stepping over the side, Mr. Cooke laid hold of a brass button and pressed a handful of the black cigars upon him.

“My regards to the detective, old man,” said he.

McCann stared.

“My regards to Drew,” my client insisted.

“Oh!” said McCann, his face lighting up, “him with the whiskers, what came from Bear Island in a cat-boat.  Sure, he wasn’t no detective, sir.”

“What was he?  A police commissioner?”

“Mr. Cooke,” said McCann, disdainfully, as he got into his boat, “he wasn’t nothing but a prospector doing the lake for one of them summer hotel companies.”

CHAPTER XIX

When the biography of the Celebrity is written, and I have no doubt it will be some day, may his biographer kindly draw a veil over that instant in his life when he was tenderly and obsequiously raised by Mr. Cooke from the trap in the floor of the Maria’s cabin.

It is sometimes the case that a good fright will heal a feud.  And whereas, before the arrival of the H. Sinclair, there had been much dissension and many quarrels concerning the disposal of the quasi Charles Wrexell Allen, when the tug steamed away to the southwards but one opinion remained,—­that, like Jonah, he must be got rid of.  And no one concurred more heartily in this than the Celebrity himself.  He strolled about and smoked apathetically, with the manner of one who was bored beyond description, whilst the discussion was going on between Farrar, Mr. Cooke, and myself as to the best place to land him.  When considerately asked by my client whether he had any choice in the matter, he replied, somewhat facetiously, that he could not think of making a suggestion to one who had shown such superlative skill in its previous management.

Mr. Trevor, too, experienced a change of sentiment in Mr. Cooke’s favor.  It is not too much to say that the senator’s scare had been of such thoroughness that he was willing to agree to almost anything.  He had come so near to being relieved of that most precious possession, his respectability, that the reason in Mr. Cooke’s course now appealed to him very strongly.  Thus he became a tacit assenter in wrong-doing, for circumstances thrust this, once in a while, upon the best of our citizens.