"You mean Cappy Ricks?"

"I believe that is the name. He has a reputation for being at once the
most reckless spendthrift and the most painstaking money saver in the
world. He is always preaching economy--"

"And well I know it. If he hadn't preached it, Captain Peasley would
never have stood for this rabble your friends wished on me."

The supercargo chuckled. "We wanted the largest vessel we could find,"
he explained; "and when it was reported to us that the Blue Star
Navigation Company's _Narcissus_ was going from San Francisco to the
West Coast and thence to New York with nitrate, we decided to get her.
We investigated you. Your name is Michael J. Murphy; naturally we knew
you were Irish; and the Irish--your kind of Irish--are not sympathetic
toward the cause of Merry England. The same held true of your chief
engineer, Mr. Reardon. We knew of the passion of this interesting
person, Cappy Ricks, for cutting down expenses. We knew you and
Reardon were new to your jobs and would be likely to consider any
reasonable plan for eliminating expense in your respective
departments, in the hope of pleasing your employer. So the suggestion
that you ship our people was made to you and Reardon, and you accepted
it with alacrity. The rest was very easy. We got in touch with your
New York agents through some friends of ours in very good standing
there, and they were enabled to charter the ship merely by offering an
extraordinary freight rate. They purchased the cargo of coal and sold
it to us at a nice profit, and we depended on your national animosity
and racial sympathy, seasoned with a liberal cash subsidy, to enable
us to deliver it. We preferred to do the decent thing, but in the