Murray repeated the name thoughtfully.  “Dunkhot?  Let’s see, that’s on the South Arabian coast, about a day’s steam from Aden, and a beast of a place to get at, so I’ve heard.  Oh, and of course, that’s the place where the She-Sultan, or Queen, or whatever she calls herself, is boss.”

“So there is really a woman of that kind there, is there?  I’d heard of her, like everybody else has, but I thought she was only a yarn.”

“No, she’s there in the flesh, sir, right enough; lots of flesh, according to what I’ve gathered.  A serang of one of the B. and I. boats, who’d been in Dunkhot, told me about her only last year.  She makes war, leads her troops, cuts off heads, and does the Eastern potentate up to the mark.  The serang said she was English, too, though I don’t believe much in that.  One-tenth English would probably be more near the truth.  The odds are she’ll be Eurasian, and those snuff-and-butter colored ladies, when they get amongst people blacker than themselves, always try to ignore their own lick of the tar-brush.”

“Fat, is she?”

“The serang said she-was a big buffalo bull of a woman, with a terror of a temper.  I don’t know what’s Mr. Wenlock’s business, sir; but whether he wants to start a dry-goods agency, or merely to arrange for smuggling in some rifles, he’d better make up his mind to square her first and foremost.  She will have a finger in every pie.  She’s as curious as a monkey, too, and there’s no doing anything without letting her know.  And when she says a thing, it’s got to be done.”

“Is she the head chief’s favorite wife, then?”

“That’s the funny part of it:  she isn’t married.  These Orientals always get husbands early as a general thing, and you’d have thought that in her juvenile days, before she got power, they’d have married her to some one about the town, whether she liked it or not.  But it seems they didn’t, because she said she’d certainly poison any man if they sent her into his zenana.  And later on, when she came to be boss, she still kept to spinsterhood.  Guess there wasn’t any man about the place white enough to suit her taste.”

“H’m.  What you’ve told me seems to let daylight on to things.”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

Captain Kettle put his hand kindly on Murray’s shoulder.  “Don’t ask me to explain now, my lad, but when the joke comes you shall share the laugh.  There’s a young man on this ship (I don’t mind telling you in confidence) whose ways I don’t quite like, and I think he’s going to get a lesson.”

He went out then under the awnings of the bridge deck, and told Wenlock that he would probably be able to earn his fee for helping on the marriage, and Wenlock confidently thought that he quite understood the situation.

“Skipper’s a bit of a methody,” thought Mr. Hugh Wenlock, “but his principles don’t go very deep when there are fifty sovereigns to be earned.  Well, he’s a useful man, and if he gets me snugly married to that little girl, he’ll be cheap at the price.”