“What are you going to do to Winton?” “Arrest him by-and-bye. If I can I’ll keep your name out of it. If I can’t, and you lose your crib, I’ll make it up to you in some way. But let me tell you one thing: you’d better play me fair, or it will be the worse for you. The ‘Cuban Queen’ is being watched night and day, and if you tell Winton of your meeting with me, and he tries to escape or you try to give us the slip yourself, you’ll be instantly arrested, and it will go hard with you then. Play me fair and I’ll play you fair, and no harm need come to you at all in the matter. Once more, will you come to my terms? If not, I’m off to the coastguard station. There’s only one policeman in Canvey, and I shall want two or three men--armed men--for Winton, and the same for you. I mean business, I can tell you. Come, is it Yes or No?” “Yes,” he answered, with a horrible oath. And then we sat down to arrange the details of our little conspiracy. CHAPTER XXVIII I BOARD THE “CUBAN QUEEN” FOR THE SECOND TIME “But when you had satisfied yourself that there _was_ a man in hiding on the ‘Cuban Queen,’” says the reader, “and when you had every reason for suspecting that man to be Mullen, why not at once arrest him? Why go to work like Tom Sawyer in ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ who, when he wished to rescue Jim the nigger from the woodshed, must needs make a seven days’ job of it, and dig the poor wretch out, when it would have been an easy matter to abstract the key and let him out through the door?” Why? Well, for several reasons, one of which is that the story would then have been shorter and perhaps less interesting. Another is that, though it is true I had good cause to suppose the man in hiding to be James Mullen, I had no actual proof of his identity. The reader must remember that I had seen him but twice in my life. The first time was in the train, going down to Southend, when my only cause for suspecting him to be Mullen was a fancied likeness to the published portrait. The second was on the day of the explosion at the Post Office, and on that occasion he had been cleverly disguised, and we had not come to close quarters until after dark, when the difficulty of identification is greatly increased. Were I, as matters then stood, to give information to the police, I could only claim to be the means of accomplishing his arrest, whereas, if I could once obtain satisfactory proof of his identity my chain of evidence would be complete, and now that I had spent so much time, thought and money on the enterprise, I preferred to carry it through myself rather than hand it over to some one else at the last moment. By taking Hughes’ place upon the “Cuban Queen” I hoped to obtain the necessary evidence, and once such evidence was in my possession, I should lose no time in effecting an arrest.