“But I had a light on it!” insisted Harris.  “It’s thar, I tell ye, and I made sure.  I don’t come botherin’ of ye with no cock-and-bull story like this unless I know.  I held a bull’s-eye light on it and it showed plain as Cape Cod Light.  One of them chists got sprung, and I thought maybe I’d made a mistake when I put the light on it, but when I rubbed my thumbnail on it I knew I was right.  I know the feel, I tell ye.  Every cussed one of ’em is the same, too.”

“I tell you, Mr. Harris, I’ve had tomfoolery enough for one night, and I ain’t going down in the hold and dig around in cargo and get the crew suspicious.  They are stirred up enough as it is with what’s gone on to-night, and I guess that’s what ails you.”

“Cuss it all, Cap’n Riggs!” exclaimed Harris in exasperation.  “Ye ought to know I don’t get gallied for a little blood spilled.  I slep’ in a bunk all one night in the Martha Pillsbury with a man what didn’t have any head and never turned a hair.  Ye know that old barkentine whaler that Cap’n Peabody sold.  Dang it all, cap’n, that is what this man Trego come aboard as he did—­that’s what he was here fer.  It come down at the last minute and he bossed the job of gettin’ it aboard.

“Wouldn’t let a man touch it, but had his own chinks from shore-side get it aboard with slings from the davits, and watched ’em stow it in the storeroom.  It ain’t in the hold.  When I come across the key to the room I made up my mind I’d have a look at it.  Tinned milk!  Marked tinned milk!  I say tinned milk hell!  I wash my hands o’ the whole cussed mess if ye don’t look at it and see for yerself.

“I don’t want the responsibility, and we’ve got to take some precaution.  That’s what the killin’ was for, and I’ll bet a clipper-ship to a doughnut-hole that writin’ chap Trenhum knows about it, and he ain’t no writin’ chap, neither.  Thar has been bad business, and there’ll be more from what’s below, mark my words.  Come below and look at it.”

“You looked it over in good shape with a light,” said Captain Riggs, evidently in doubt as to what he should do.  “It ought to be on the manifest, you know, Mr. Harris.”

“Cuss the manifest!  It’s down as machinery and marked tinned milk.  What more ye want?  They got things switched somehow, and that’s plain as the nose on yer face.  I had my thumb on it, I tell ye.”

“Then, if that is true, it explains why Mr. Trego was so mysterious, and why he wanted to be a passenger to the others.  That’s what he was aboard for, right enough, and like as not he would have told me if he had been left alive long enough.  It don’t strike me reasonable that he’d keep anything like that from me—­not with the way things are going these days.  The master of the vessel ought to know in a case like that, and a scraped-up crew.”  Riggs began to button his coat.

“Of course that was what he was so close-jawed for, and that’s why the owners was so close-jawed.  Like as not they didn’t know—­charter was for cargo, and they didn’t bother their head about that part of it.  Some sort of a sneak game about it, of course, but we’ve got to mind our P’s and Q’s now.