e form of Captain Cable in his shore-going clothes. The little
sailor was ushered in by the well-trained servant of this bachelor
household without surprise or comment.

Cartoner made him welcome with a cigar and an offer of refreshment,
which was refused. Captain Cable knew that as you progress upward in the
social scale the refusal of refreshment becomes an easier matter until
at last you can really do as you like and not as etiquette dictates,
while to decline the beggar's pint of beer is absolute rudeness.

"We've always dealt square by each other, you and I," said the captain,
when he had lighted his cigar. Then he fell into a reminiscent humor,
and presently broke into a chuckling laugh.

"If it hadn't been for you, them Dons would have had me up against the
wall and shot me, sure as fate," he said, bringing his hand down on
his knee with a keen sense of enjoyment. "That was ten years ago last
November, when the _Minnie_ had been out of the builder's yard a matter
of six months."

"Yes," said Cartoner, putting the dates carefully together in his mind.
It seemed that the building of the _Minnie_ was not the epoch upon which
he reckoned his periods.

"She's in Morrison's dry-dock now," said the captain, who in a certain
way was like a young mother. For him all the topics were but a number of
by-ways leading ultimately to the same centre. "You should go down and
see her, Mr. Cartoner. It's a big dock. You can walk right round her in
the mud at the bottom of the dock and see her finely."

Cartoner said he would. They even arranged a date on which to carry
out this plan, and included in it an inspection of the _Minnie's_ new
boiler. Then Captain Cable remembered what he had come for, and the plan
was never carried out after all.

"Yes," he said, "you've a reckoning against me, Mr. Cartoner. I have
never done you a good turn that I know of, and you saved my life, I
believe, that time--you and that Frenchman who talks so quick, Moonseer
Deulin--that time, over yonder."

And he nodded his head towards the southwest with the accuracy of one
who never loses his bearings. For there are some people who always know
which is the north; and others who, if asked suddenly, do not know their
left hand from their right; and others, again, who say--or shout--that
all men are created equal.

"I've been done, Mr. Cartoner--that is what I've come to tell you. Me
that has always been so smart and has dealt straight by other men