“’Tis the kind of a game you used to like, Johnny. I have looked over the steamer, and she would please you. Politics are stewin’ in the Persian Gulf and intrigues are as thick as huckleberries. The British and the Russians have locked horns again, do ye mind, and the poor deluded Persians will be prodded into a revolution, and divil a bit of good it will do them. When the smoke clears the two benevolent Powers will try to beat each other to the plunder. Just now they are manœuvrin’ for position.” “Pshaw! Cap’n Mike, haven’t you recovered from them delusions about the Persian Gulf?” growled the engineer. “’Tis no dream, Johnny. I have met a man in New York. He came from Europe to find me. The proposition is copper-riveted. I take the steamer and load her with arms and munitions in a Mediterranean port and deliver them to certain parties somewheres the other side of Aden. The British gun-boats are patrollin’ the Gulf to put a crimp in this industry, so there will be a run for me money.” Johnny Kent was silent while he meditated and listened to the whisper of temptation. Then a pig grunted in its straw litter, a chicken chirped drowsily on its perch, and the breeze rustled among the luxuriant pole-beans and tomatoes. And O’Shea had come to coax him away from this enchanted place. He would hear what the blarneying rascal had to say and convince him of his folly. The shipmaster liked not the stolid silence of his companion. He knew it of old for a stubbornness that nothing could budge. However, he went on with the argument: “I need an engineer, Johnny. And will ye not take one more fling with me? You are an old rover, and this messing about a farm will not content you for long. ’Tis no place for a bold man that knows his trade. Wait a bit and come back here when ye have seen the green seas tumbling over the bows once more and felt the swing of a good ship under you, and heard the trade-winds singing in your ears, and watched the strange faces in ports that are new to ye.” “I’ve heard you talk before, Cap’n Mike, and your tongue never gets hung on a dead-centre,” was the deliberate reply. “You’ll have to dish up something more attractive than the blisterin’ Persian Gulf to drag me from my moorings. Do I act restless?” “About as much so as that old barn yonder,” admitted the other. “See here, Cap’n Mike, the farm next to mine can be bought cheap. It cuts a hundred tons of hay and pastures forty head of stock. I meant to write you about it soon. Why don’t you buy it and settle down alongside of me?” “You are the hopeless old barnacle,” laughed O’Shea. “’Tis plain that I waste me words. If my seductive persuasions have missed fire entirely I must bid ye farewell in the morning and lay a course back to New York.” “I wish I could hold you longer,” sighed Johnny Kent. “The Grange picnic comes right after hayin’, and there’s other excitements to keep you busy.”