Without any exaggeration, there were three or four hundred people crowding about the gangway. Morris had hurried ahead, and had Stomati and two of the crew on deck to salute as I came aboard through a narrow lane of humanity. In two minutes we had cast off and our engines were slowly pulling the _France_, stern first, into the stream. As her head came slowly around, and her nose pointed seaward, Morris dipped the flag on account of our poor old Rodwaner left with his empty purse. “What interests me,” I told Morris that night, as I sat smoking after my dinner, “is where the old man got the balance of that gold.” “He sure was up against it,” replied my chief of staff. “Yes, sir, old man Rodwaner had to scratch. It’s my opinion, sir, that old man Rodwaner is all in.” “How’s that?” I asked. “You took all he had and then he puts on his hat and goes and pawns Rachel’s sealskin sacque and diamonds, and that, sir, is where your last £5 came from. Yes, sir, I believe it. That’s just what old man Rodwaner done.” With $1000 gold in my belt, we shaped our course for the Crimea. CHAPTER IX _We Reach Sevastopol and Land in Spite of Harbor Regulations, Get a Story and Sail Away with It to the Coast of Asia Minor_ The reader of stories of adventure naturally expects to have something sensational doing every minute. Why else, indeed, has he paid his money? But there are dull spots in even the most strenuous tales (that is, in real life), and the narrator of fact must blushingly, or, at best, hurry over the places where interest flags. Our trip from the Danube mouth to the Crimean Peninsula was unusual only in the fact that the sea was quiet, and that it was possible to remain in one’s bunk. No world diplomat ever felt more perfect satisfaction at a successfully executed international coup d’état than I did that night as, with money belts stuffed with gold, the _France_ cut through the waves, turning up with her steel nose a ridge of ripples that left an ever wider wedge of silver in our moonlit wake. A square meal and a good cigar combined to make that evening a picture, which still stands out in my mind as an oasis in the desert of that Black Sea trip. At ten o’clock I took a “look-see” around the boat before turning in for the night, and found that every member of the crew, save the man at the wheel, had crawled off into some corner and gone to sleep. Even the look-out had squeezed himself into the chain locker out of the wind, and was making a sound like the exhaust of a gasoline launch. For a few minutes I was tempted to wake up the various delinquents, but when I thought of the past days and nights of cold and overwork, I softened and let them sleep peacefully on. The only danger on such a smooth sea that I could think of was collision, and that seemed improbable, as there were almost no ships navigating those waters just at that time, and, anyway, surely the other ship would keep watch and see us, even if we failed to see