d right up to it
and swing right into it--day in, day out. And then see how you've taken
this disappointment, when everybody knows you must have been tautened up
to shying-point! I wish you'd let me tell you, Mr. Dodd, that you've
stood out mighty manly and handsomely in all this business, and made
every one like you and admire you. And I wish you'd let me tell you,
besides, that I've taken this wreck business as much to heart as you
have; something kind of rises in my throat when I think we're beaten;
and if I thought waiting would do it, I would stick on this reef until
we starved."

I tried in vain to thank him for these generous words, but he was
beforehand with me in a moment.

"I didn't bring you ashore to sound my praises," he interrupted. "We
understand one another now, that's all; and I guess you can trust me.
What I wished to speak about is more important, and it's got to be
faced. What are we to do about the _Flying Scud_ and the dime novel?"

"I really have thought nothing about that," I replied; "but I expect I
mean to get at the bottom of it, and if the bogus Captain Trent is to be
found on the earth's surface, I guess I mean to find him."

"All you've got to do is talk," said Nares; "you can make the biggest
kind of boom; it isn't often the reporters have a chance at such a yarn
as this; and I can tell you how it will go. It will go by telegraph, Mr.
Dodd; it'll be telegraphed by the column, and headlined, and frothed up,
and denied by authority, and it'll hit bogus Captain Trent in a Mexican
bar-room, and knock over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up the
Baltic, and bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors' music-halls round
Greenock. O, there's no doubt you can have a regular domestic Judgment
Day. The only point is whether you deliberately want to."

"Well," said I, "I deliberately don't want one thing: I deliberately
don't want to make a public exhibition of myself and Pinkerton: so
moral--smuggling opium; such damned fools--paying fifty thousand for a
'dead horse'!"

"No doubt it might damage you in a business sense," the captain agreed;
"and I'm pleased you take that view, for I've turned kind of soft upon
the job. There's been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, law
bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would
slip right out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you'd only
collar a lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back
of the bu