ye on these men, and say nothing about what I've told you, but just
watch. If you catch Cranze so clearly trying it on that the Courts give
a conviction, the Company will pay you L200."

"It's a lot of money."

"My Company will find it a lot cheaper than paying out L20,000, and
that's what Hamilton's insured for."

"Phew! I didn't know we were dealing with such big figures. Well, Mr.
Cranze has got his inducements to murder the man, anyway."

"I told you that from the first. Now, Captain, are you going to take my
check for that preliminary L20?"

"Hand it over," said Kettle. "I see no objections. And you may as well
give me a bit of a letter about the balance."

"I'll do both," said Lupton, and took out his stylograph, and called a
waiter to bring him hotel writing paper.

Now Captain Owen Kettle, once he had taken up this piece of employment,
entered into it with a kind of chastened joy. The Life Insurance
Company's agent had rather sneered at ship-captains as a class (so he
considered), and though the man did his best to be outwardly civil, it
was plain that he considered a mob of passengers the intellectual
superiors of any master mariner. So Kettle intended to prove himself the
"complete detective" out of sheer _esprit de corps_.

As he had surmised, Messrs. Hamilton and Cranze remained the
_Flamingo's_ only two passengers, and so he considered he might devote
full attention to them without being remarkable. If he had been a
steward making sure of his tips he could not have been more solicitous
for their welfare; and to say he watched them like a cat is putting the
thing feebly. Any man with an uneasy conscience must have grasped from
the very first that the plot had been guessed at, and that this awkward
little skipper, with his oppressive civilities, was merely waiting his
chance to act as Nemesis.

But either Mr. Cranze had an easy mind, and Lupton had unjustly
maligned him, or he was a fellow of the most brazen assurance. He
refused to take the least vestige of a warning. He came on board with a
dozen cases of champagne and four of liqueur brandy as a part of his
personal luggage, and his first question to every official he came
across was how much he would have to pay per bottle for corkage.

As he made these inquiries from a donkey-man, two deck hands, three
mates, a trimmer, the third engineer, two stewards, and Captain Kettle
himself, the answers he received were various, and some of them were
pr