on the look-out, and one of the coolie crew was at the wheel.

"I'm not given to meeting trouble half-way," said Blood, shifting his
position and leaning with his left arm on the rail, "but it 'pears to
me Pat Ginnell is taking his set down a mighty sight too easy. He's
got something up his sleeve."

"So've we," replied Harman. "What can he do? He laid out to shanghai
you, and by gum, he did it. I don't say I didn't let him down crool,
playin' into his hands and pretendin' to help and gettin' Captain Mike
as a witness, but the fac' remains he got you aboard this hooker by
foul play, shanghaied you were, and then you turns the tables on him,
knocks the stuffin' out of him and turns him into a deck hand. How's
he to complain? I'd start back to 'Frisco now and dare him to come
ashore with his complaints. We've got his ship, well, that's his
fault. He's no legs to stand on, that's truth.

"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 w