mankind that plies in the Pacific. From
its outside view I could thus make no deduction; and, strange to say,
the interior was concealed. All the other chests, as I have said
already, we had found gaping open, and their contents scattered abroad;
the same remark we found to apply afterwards in the quarters of the
seamen; only this camphor-wood chest, a singular exception, was both
closed and locked.

I took an axe to it, readily forced the paltry Chinese fastening, and,
like a Custom House officer, plunged my hands among the contents. For
some while I groped among linen and cotton. Then my teeth were set on
edge with silk, of which I drew forth several strips covered with
mysterious characters. And these settled the business, for I recognised
them as a kind of bed-hanging, popular with the commoner class of the
Chinese. Nor were further evidences wanting, such as night-clothes of an
extraordinary design, a three-stringed Chinese fiddle, a silk
handkerchief full of roots and herbs, and a neat apparatus for smoking
opium, with a liberal provision of the drug. Plainly, then, the cook had
been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen the
chest before he proceeded to ship under a false name and domicile? It
was possible, as anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded
as a solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog. For why should
this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the others were
rummaged or removed? and where had Jos. come by that second chest, with
which (according to the clerk at the What Cheer) he had started for
Honolulu?

"And how have _you_ fared?" inquired the captain, whom I found
luxuriously reclining in our mound of litter. And the accent on the
pronoun, the heightened colour of the speaker's face, and the contained
excitement in his tones, advertised me at once that I had not been alone
to make discoveries.

"I have found a Chinaman's chest in the galley," said I, "and John (if
there was any John) was not so much as at the pains to take his opium."

Nares seemed to take it mighty quietly. "That so?" said he. "Now, cast
your eyes on that and own you're beaten!" and with a formidable clap of
his open hand, he flattened out before me, on the deck, a pair of
newspapers.

I gazed upon them dully, being in no mood for fresh discoveries.

"Look at them, Mr. Dodd," cried the captain sharply. "Can't you look at
them?" And he ran a dirty thumb along the title.