y minutes
ahead. Well, I must go below and clean up after you've docked her."

CHAPTER VIII

TO CAPTURE AN HEIRESS

The _Parakeet_ had discharged the last of her coal into the lighters
alongside, had cast off from the mooring buoys, and was steaming out of
the baking heat of Suez harbor on her way down toward the worse heat of
the Red Sea beyond. The clatter and dirt of the-working ships, with the
smells of hot iron and black humanity, were dying out astern, and
presently she slowed up to drop the pilot into his boat, and then stood
on again along her course.

A passenger, a young man of eight or nine-and-twenty, lounged on a
camp-stool under the upper bridge awning, and watched the _Parakeet's_
captain as he walked briskly across and across, and presently, when the
little sailor faced him, he nodded as though he had decided something
that was in his thoughts.

"Well, sir?" said Captain Kettle.

"I wish you wouldn't look so anxious. We've started now, and may as well
make up our minds to go through it comfortably."

"Quite so," said Kettle. "I'm thinking out how we are to do this
business in comfort--and safety," and with that he resumed his walk.

The man beside him had introduced himself when the black workers were
carrying the _Parakeet's_ cargo of coal in baskets from the holds to the
lighters alongside; and Kettle had been rather startled to find that he
carried a letter of introduction from the steamboat's owners. The letter
gave him no choice of procedure. It stated with clearness that Mr. Hugh
Wenlock, solicitor, had laid his wishes before them, and that they had
agreed to further these wishes (through the agency of their
servant--Captain Owen Kettle) in consideration of the payment of
L200 sterling.

The _Parakeet_ was a cargo tramp, and carried no passenger certificate,
but a letter of recommendation like this was equivalent to a direct
order, and Kettle signed Mr. Wenlock on to his crew list as "Doctor,"
and put to sea with an anxious mind.

Wenlock waited awhile, watching squalid Suez sink into the sea behind;
and then he spoke again.

"Look here, Captain," he said, "those South Arabian ports have got a lot
worse reputation than they really deserve. The people down there twenty
years ago were a pack of pirates, I'll grant you, but nowadays they know
that if they get at any of their old games, a British gunboat promptly
comes up next week and bombards them at two-mile range, and that's n