. _There is_ something fishy goin' on, I'm
certain. And now here's somethin' else you ought to know--somethin'
about this red-bearded, nigger-drivin' swab of a Warner. I know the
cove, though he doesn't know me."

"Ah!" said Barry with quickened interest, "what do you know of him,
Joe?"

Taking his pipe out of his mouth and speaking very slowly the seaman
repeated his last words.

"I know him, sir, now, though I didn't when he first came aboard with
his crowd o' bloody cannibals. But when you give him that knock-out
lift under the jaw the other day, me and Sam Button, you will remember,
helped him down into the cabin and laid him in his bunk, hopin' the
swab was dead. The skipper told us to open his shirt at the neck, as
he was a-breathin' so bad, and when we opens his shirt I sees a ship
tattooed across his chest--then I knew where I'd seen that there chap
with the red beard and that partikler tattooing before. It was the
picture of a Yankee man-o'-war with her name over it--_The Franklin_,
and I reckerlected when I'd seen it last--about nine year ago in Fiji."

"Go on, Joe," said the officer, as the man hesitated.

"Right, sir; but now I might as well tell you how I did come to see it.
I was bummin' around in Levuka lookin' for a ship, havin' just done
four months' hard, when I meets a petty officer belonging to a gunboat,
who asked me if I wanted a week's job. He was scourin' all round the
place to pick up sailor men, so me and about half a dozen more chaps
was taken off on board the gunboat. She had been cruising in the
Solomon Islands, and a lot of her men died from fever. Then when she
was coming back to Fiji she got caught in a hurricane and dismasted,
and sailed into Levuka under jury-masts, and us chaps were set to work
to help refit her for the voyage to Sydney. And the first thing I saw
when I got aboard was this here chap Warner, who was washing himself up
for'ard with a sentry standing over him and his leg irons lying on the
deck ready to be shackled on again as soon as he had finished washing.
I noticed his big beard, and partikler noticed the ship on his breast.
I asked one of the bluejackets who the chap was. 'Bloomin' slaver and
cut-throat,' says he. 'We collared him off Bougainville in his cutter.
He's the chap that shot over thirty niggers on San Christoval in cold
blood two year ago, and we're taking him to Sydney to try and sheet it
home to him.' So that's what _I_ knows about Mr.