lot of us could have made a lot of money. Needless
to say, we were ready enough to go in with them. Already they had a
scheme of getting a ship such as they particularly needed. There was
at that time lying at Hong-Kong a sort of tramp steamer, the
_Elizabeth Robinson_, the skipper of which wanted a crew for a trip to
Chemulpo, up the Yellow Sea. Salter Quick got himself into the
confidence and graces of this skipper, and offered to man his ship for
him, and he packed her as far as he could--with his own brother, Noah,
myself, my French friend, and a certain Chinese cook of whom he knew
and who could be trusted--trusted, that is, to fall in whatever we
wanted."

"Am I right in supposing the name of the Chinese cook to have been Lo
Chuh Fen?" I asked.

"Quite right--Lo Chuh Fen was the man," answered Baxter. "A very
handy man for anything, as you'll admit, for you've already seen
him--he's the man who attended on Miss Raven and who served our
supper. I came across him again, in Limehouse, recently, and took him
into my service once more. Very well--now you understand that there
were five of us all in for the Quick's plan, and the notion was that
when we'd once got safely out of Hong-Kong, Salter, who had a
particularly greasy and insinuating tongue, should get round certain
others of the crew by means of promises helped out by actual cash
bribes. That done, we were going to put the skipper, his mates, and
such of the men as wouldn't fall in with us, in a boat with provisions
and let them find their way wherever they liked, while we went off
with the steamer. That was the surface plan--my own belief is that if
it had come to it, the two Quicks would have been quite ready to make
skipper and men walk the plank, or to have settled them in any other
way--both Noah and Salter, for all their respectable appearance, were
born out of their due time--they were admirably qualified to have been
lieutenants to Paul Jones or any other eighteenth-century pirate! But
in this particular instance, their schemes went all wrong. Whether it
was that the skipper of the _Elizabeth Robinson_, who was an American
and cuter than we fancied, got wind of something, or whether somebody
spilt to him, I don't know, but the fact is that one fine morning when
we were in the Yellow Sea he and the rest of them set on the Quicks,
my friend, myself, and the Chinaman, bundled us into a boat and landed
us on a miserable island, to fend for ourselves. Ther