All were watching us now, the captain and the mate from the quarter-deck, the others from wherever they happened to be. "I am loath to draw your sister's younger brother into danger," Roger began. His adjective was tactfully chosen. "I am almost equally reluctant to implicate you in what seems likely to confront us, because you are an old friend of mine and a good deal younger than I am. But when the time comes to go home, Ben, I'm sure we want to be able to look your sister and all the others squarely in the eyes, with our hands clean and our consciences clear--if we go home. How about it, Ben?" I was too bewildered to answer, and in Roger's eyes something of his old twinkle appeared. "Ultimately," he continued, grave once more and speaking still in enigmas, "we shall be vindicated in any case. But I fear that, before then, I, for one, shall have to clasp hands with mutiny, perhaps with piracy. How would you like that, Ben, with a thundering old fight against odds, a fight that likely enough will leave us to sleep forever on one of these green islands hereabouts?" Still I did not understand. Roger regarded me thoughtfully. "Tell me all that you know about our cargo." "Why," said I, finding my tongue at last, "it's ginseng and woollen goods for Canton. That's all I know." "Then you don't know that at this moment there is one hundred thousand dollars in gold in the hold of the Island Princess?" "What?" I gasped. "One hundred thousand dollars in gold." I could not believe my ears. Certainly, so far as I was concerned, the secret had been well kept. Then a new thought came to me, "Does Captain Falk know?" I asked. "Yes," said Roger, "Captain Falk knows." CHAPTER XII A STRANGE TALE Roger Hamlin's words were to linger a long time in my ears, and so far as I then could see, there was little to say in reply. A hundred thousand dollars in gold had bought, soul and body, many a better man than Captain Falk. At that very moment Falk was watching us from the quarter-deck with an expression on his face that was partly an amused smile, partly a sneer. Weak and conceited though he was, he was master of that ship and crew in more ways than one. But Roger had not finished. "Do you remember, Ben," he continued in a low voice, but otherwise unmindful of those about us, "that some half a dozen years ago, when Thomas Webster was sore put to it for enough money to square his debts and make a clean start, the brig Vesper, on which he had sent a venture, returned him a profit so unbelievably great that he was able to pay his creditors and buy from the Shattucks the old Eastern Empress, which he fitted out for the voyage to Sumatra that saved his fortunes?" I remembered it vaguely--I had been only a small boy when it happened--and I listened with keenest interest. The Websters owned the Island Princess.