lence, and then Nares cleared his throat.

"We've been pretty good friends, you and me, Mr. Dodd," he resumed.
"We've been going through the kind of thing that tries a man. We've had
the hardest kind of work, we've been badly backed, and now we're badly
beaten. And we've fetched through without a word of disagreement. I
don't say this to praise myself: it's my trade; it's what I'm paid for,
and trained for, and brought up to. But it was another thing for you; it
was all new to you; and it did me good to see you stand right up to it
and swing right into it, day in, day out. And then see how you've taken
this disappointment, when everybody knows you must have been tautened
up to shying-point! I wish you'd let me tell you, Mr. Dodd, that you've
stood out mighty manly and handsomely in all this business, and made
every one like you and admire you. And I wish you'd let me tell you,
besides, that I've taken this wreck business as much to heart as you
have; something kind of rises in my throat when I think we're beaten;
and if I thought waiting would do it, I would stick on this reef until
we starved."

I tried in vain to thank him for these generous words, but he was
beforehand with me in a moment.

"I didn't bring you ashore to sound my praises," he interrupted. "We
understand one another now, that's all; and I guess you can trust me.
What I wished to speak about is more important, and it's got to be
faced. What are we to do about the Flying Scud and the dime novel?"

"I really have thought nothing about that," I replied. "But I expect I
mean to get at the bottom of it; and if the bogus Captain Trent is to be
found on the earth's surface, I guess I mean to find him."

"All you've got to do is talk," said Nares; "you can make the biggest
kind of boom; it isn't often the reporters have a chance at such a yarn
as this; and I can tell you how it will go. It will go by telegraph, Mr.
Dodd; it'll be telegraphed by the column, and head-lined, and frothed
up, and denied by authority, and it'll hit bogus Captain Trent in a
Mexican bar-room, and knock over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up
the Baltic, and bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors' music halls round
Greenock. O, there's no doubt you can have a regular domestic Judgment
Day. The only point is whether you deliberately want to."

"Well," said I, "I deliberately don't want one thing: I deliberately
don't want to make a public exhibition of myself and Pinkerton: so
mo