his way to
earning that extra L200, which he would very much like to have fingered.
To let this vulgar, drunken ruffian commit some overt act against
Hamilton's life, without doing him actual damage, seemed an
impossibility. He had taken far to great a fancy for Hamilton to allow
him to be hurt. He was beginning to be mystified by the whole thing. The
case was by no means so simple and straightforward as it had looked when
Lupton put it to him in the hotel smoking-room ashore.

Had Cranze been any other passenger, he would have stopped his drunken
riotings by taking away the drink, and by giving strict orders that the
man was to be supplied with no further intoxicants. But Cranze sober
might be dangerous, while Cranze tipsy was merely a figure of ridicule;
so he submitted, very much against his grain, to having his ship made
into a bear-garden, and anxiously awaited developments.

The _Flamingo_ cleared the south of Florida, sighted the high land of
Cuba, and stood across through the Yucatan channel to commence her
peddling business in Honduras, and at some twenty ports she came to an
anchor six miles off shore, and hooted with her siren till lighters
came off through the surf and the shallows.

Machinery they sent ashore at these little-known stations, coal, powder,
dress-goods, and pianos, receiving in return a varied assortment of
hides, mahogany, dyewoods, and some parcels of ore. There was a small
ferrying business done also between neighboring ports in unclean native
passengers, who harbored on the foredeck, and complained of want of
deference from the crew.

Hamilton appeared to extract some melancholy pleasure from it all, and
Cranze remained unvaryingly drunk. Cranze passed insults to casual
strangers who came on board and did not know his little ways, and the
casual strangers (after the custom of their happy country) tried to
knife him, but were always knocked over in the nick of time, by some
member of the _Flamingo's_ crew. Hamilton said there was a special
providence which looks after drunkards of Cranze's type, and declined to
interfere; and Cranze said he refused to be chided by a qualified
teetotaller, and mixed himself further king's pegs.

Messrs. Bird, Bird and Co., being of an economical turn of mind, did not
fall into the error of overmanning their ships, and so as one of the
mates chose to be knocked over by six months' old malarial fever,
Captain Kettle had practically to do a mate's duty as