up, and denied by authority, and it'll hit bogus Captain Trent in a
Mexican bar-room, and knock over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up
the Baltic, and bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors' music halls round
Greenock. O, there's no doubt you can have a regular domestic Judgment
Day. The only point is whether you deliberately want to."

"Well," said I, "I deliberately don't want one thing: I deliberately
don't want to make a public exhibition of myself and Pinkerton: so
moral--smuggling opium; such damned fools--paying fifty thousand for a
'dead horse'!"

"No doubt it might damage you in a business sense," the captain agreed.
"And I'm pleased you take that view; for I've turned kind of soft upon
the job. There's been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, Law
bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the premier artists would
slip right out with the boodle in their grip-sacks, and you'd only
collar a lot of old mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back
of the business from the front. I don't take much stock in Mercantile
Jack, you know that; but, poor devil, he's got to go where he's told;
and if you make trouble, ten to one it'll make you sick to see the
innocents who have to stand the racket. It would be different if we
understood the operation; but we don't, you see: there's a lot of queer
corners in life; and my vote is to let the blame' thing lie."

"You speak as if we had that in our power," I objected.

"And so we have," said he.

"What about the men?" I asked. "They know too much by half; and you
can't keep them from talking."