. Done,
hoodwinked, tricked--same as a Sunday-school teacher. And I can do you
a good turn by telling you about it; and I can do the other man a bad
turn, which is what I want to do. Besides, it's dirty work. Me, that has
always kept my hands----"

He looked at his hands, and decided not to pursue the subject.

"You'll say that for me, Mr. Cartoner--you that has known me ten years
and more."

"Yes, I'll say that for you," answered Cartoner, with a laugh.

"They did me!" cried the captain, leaning forward and banging his hand
down on the table, "with the old trick of a bill of lading lost in the
post and a man in a gold-laced hat that came aboard one night and said
he was a government official from the Arsenal come for his government
stuff. And it wasn't government stuff, and he wasn't a government
official. It was----"

Captain Cable paused and looked carefully round the room. He even looked
up to the ceiling, from a long habit of living beneath deck skylights.

"Bombs!" he concluded--"bombs!"

Then he went further, and qualified the bombs in terms which need not be
set down here.

"You know me and you know the _Minnie_, Mr. Cartoner!" continued the
angry sailor. "She was specialty built with large hatches for machinery,
and--well, guns. She was built to carry explosives, and there's not a
man in London will insure her. Well, we got into the way of carrying war
material. It was only natural, being built for it. But you'll bear me
out, and there are others to bear me out, that we've only carried clean
stuff up to now--plain, honest, fighting stuff for one side or the
other. Always honest--revolutions and the like, and an open fight. But
bombs----"

And here again the captain made use of nautical terms which have no
place on a polite page.

"There's bombs about, and it's me that has been carrying them," he
concluded. "That is what I have got to tell you."

"How do you know?" asked Cartoner, in his gentle and soothing way.

The captain settled himself in his chair, and crossed one leg over the
other.

"Know the Johannis Bulwark, in Hamburg?"

Cartoner nodded.

"Know the Seemannshaus there?"

"Yes. The house that stands high up among the trees overlooking the
docks."

"That's the place," said Captain Cable. "Well, one night I was up there,
on the terrace in front of the house where the sailors sit and spit all
day waiting to be taken on. Got into Hamburg short-handed. I was picking
up a crew. Not the