"Matt! It isn't possible, is it?"

"I'll bet Mike Murphy and I could steal her back if we had half a
chance. The odds would be forty to two against our succeeding, but a
little strategy is sometimes to be preferred to great horsepower. I
think I could do it, and I think Murphy will do it--if he only thinks
of it."

"How? Tell me how you'd steal her back."

"What's the use?" Matt replied wearily. "I'd have to have help. So
will Mike--and I've just remembered Mike Murphy and Terence Reardon
are the wrong kind of Irish to have together in the same ship. We did
our best to prevent it, but the odds are too long for us; the coal is
for the Germans and we hate England, so why worry? I know Mike Murphy
will not take that view of it; for my sake he'll fight to the last
gasp, but he must have help, and Reardon owes me no such allegiance as
Murphy."

"Well, he owes me something," Cappy spoke up. "You promised him a
hundred and seventy-five dollars a month and I raised the ante to two
hundred. It was an investment, pure and simple. I was buying loyalty,
and by the Holy Pink-Toed Prophet, I think I'll get it. Come to think
of it, there was a look in Reardon's eyes that I liked, when he took
my hand in those greasy paws of his and said he was a proud man to
work for me. Matt, that fellow is full of bellicose veins. He may not
fight for me, but he'll fight for Mrs. Reardon and the children and
that two-hundred-dollar-a-month job, for it's the first he's ever had
and if he loses out it'll be the last he'll ever get. He was telling
me all about his family and how much the job meant to him, that day we