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“It was on the Belle Brandon !” he cried out, very excited. “A stout old party, fair complected, who played the flute.”

“That’s him!” cried Phelps, half-starting from his chair.

“I reckon he must be up Jaluit way,” said Tom coolly, “Captain Cole being bound for the Marshalls at the time.”

I could feel them shooting glances all around us.

“It’s remarkable your friend here doesn’t remember him,” says the one they called Nettleship, indicating me with the heel of his glass.

“I didn’t happen to get aboard the Brandon,” says I. “What was I doing, Tom? I disremember.”

“That was when you was laid up with boils,” says Tom, as ready as lightning.

“So it was,” says I.

“You didn’t happen to pass any talk with him?” asks Mr. Phelps of Tom.

“Nothing particular,” says Tom.

“Even a little might help us,” says Mr. Phelps. “See if you can’t remember.”

“Oh! he said he was looking for a quiet place to end his days in,” answers Tom.

“I wonder that this here island wasn’t to his taste,” says Mr. Nettleship, with a quick look.

“Oh, it was,” says Tom unabashed, “only Captain Cole broke in and said he knew a better.”

By this time nearly all our heads were touching over the table, except the one they called the bookkeeper, who had run for a chart.

“Did he call the island by any particular name?” inquires Mr. Phelps.

“I think he said Pleasant Island,” says Tom, “because I mind the old gentleman saying it must be a pleasant place with such a name and I said I had been there, but the holding ground was poor.”

The bookkeeper laid the chart on the table, and the captain found Pleasant Island with his thumb.

He was about to say it was a ten days’ run leeward, when he broke off sudden with “ouch” instead, being kicked hard under the table, and pretending it was the beginning of a cough instead.

“I’m looking for a change of weather at the full of the moon,” remarks Tom, “and you’d be wise to take this good spell while it lasts.”

I guess Tom overdid it this time, and I gave him hell for it when we went ashore, for I saw the change on Phelps’s face, and that he suddenly suspicioned Tom was playing double.

“Business comes first,” he says, rolling up the chart, “and though I would like to find him, just for my poor wife’s satisfaction, I can’t go wild-goose-chasing all over the Pacific for a woman’s whim.”

Tom was beginning to feel that he had overdone it, too, and roused more suspicion than he had laid; so he thought to make it up by losing interest in Old Dibs, and what was Fitzsimmons doing now, and was it true that John L. had retired from the ring? But he didn’t seem to recover the ground he had lost, and I judged it a bad sign when we went up the companion for Phelps to say, kind of absent-minded, that he’d go two hundred and fifty pounds for his father-in-law, alive or dead–raising it to five hundred as we dropped over the side.

We pulled first to Tom’s house, so as to divert suspicion, and from there I went along by myself to tip off the news to Old Dibs. When I had given the knocks agreed on, three sets of four, he drew back the trap, and asked very cheerful how I had made out with the books and papers.

“Good God, man, they’re here!” says I.

“Who’s here?” he asks, incredulous.

“A whole schooner of detectives from Sydney,” says I. “They say they’re buying guano islands, but there’s already five hundred pounds out for you, dead or alive.”

His great fat hand began to shake on the trap.

“Never you mind, Mr. Smith,” I says reassuring. “Tom will be due here at midnight, and then we’ll run you up your tree.”

But that didn’t seem to soothe him any, and he quavered out he would be better where he was. But I said they’d rummage the whole island upside down before they were done, and all he had to do was to lay low, not worry, and let me and Tom handle the thing for him.