I gave her but little thought. A sort of numbness had come over me. I
could think of the girl who had cut me free, and for all my resentment
at the indignity of my treatment, I had hardly a thought to spare for
the man who had me bound. I was pleased to remember that she hated him;
that she had said so herself. For the rest, I had a vague notion of
going to the English Consul in Havana. After all, I was not a complete
nobody. I was John Kemp, a gentleman, well connected; I could prove
it. The Bow Street runner had not been dead as I had thought. The
last letter from Veronica informed me that the man had given up
thief-catching, and was keeping, now, a little inn in the neighbourhood.
Ralph, my brother-in-law, had helped him to it, no doubt. I could come
home safely now.

And I had discovered I was no longer anxious to return home.

CHAPTER FIVE

There wasn't any weirdness about the ship when I woke in the sunlight.
She was old and slow and rather small. She carried Lumsden (master),
Mercer (mate), a crew that seemed no better and no worse than any other
crew, and the old gentleman who had thrown me the rope the night before,
and who seemed to think that he had derogated from his dignity in doing
it. He was a Major Cowper, retiring from a West Indian regiment, and had
with him his wife and a disagreeable little girl, with a yellow pigtail
and a bony little chest and arms.

On the whole, they weren't the sort of people that one would have chosen
for companions on a pleasure-trip. Major Cowper's wife lay all day in a
deck chair, alternately drawing to her and repulsing the whining little
girl. The major talked to me about the scandals with which the world was
filled, and kept a suspicious eye upon his wife. He spent the morning
in shaving what part of his face his white whiskers did not cover, the
afternoon in enumerating to me the subjects on which he intended to
write to the Horse Guards. He had grown entirely amiable, perhaps for
the reason that his wife ignored my existence.

Meantime I let the days slip by idly, only wondering how I could manage
to remain in Havana and breathe the air of the same island with the girl
who had delivered me. Perhaps some day we might meet--who knows? I was
not afraid of that Irishman.

It never occurred to me to bother about the course we were taking,
till one day we sighted the Cuban coast, and I heard Lumsden and Mercer
pronounce the name of Rio Medio. The two ridiculous o