Some answer was forthcoming--what, it mattered not. The launch bumped into the rusty ribs of a twelve-hundred ton tramp. A rope ladder was lowered. A round-faced Teuton mate--fat and placid--was vastly surprised to find a horde of nondescripts pouring up the ship's side in the wake of a short, thick, bovine-looking person who neither understood nor tried to understand a word he was saying.
These extraordinary visitors from the deep brought with them a girl and three wounded men. By this time the captain was aroused; he spoke some English.
"Vas iss diss?" he asked, surveying the newcomers with amazement, and their bizarre costumes with growing nervousness. "Vere haf you coomed vrom?"
Coke pushed him playfully into the cook's galley.
"This is too easy," he chortled. "Set about 'em, you swabs. Don't hurt anybody unless they ax for it. Round every son of a gun into the fo'c'sle till I come. Mr. Watts, the bridge for you. Olsen, take the wheel. Mr. Hozier, see wot you can find in their flag locker. _Now_, Mr. Norrie! Sharp for it. You're wanted in the engine-room."
And that is how ex-President Dom Corria Antonio De Sylva acquired the nucleus of his fleet, though, unhappily, an accident to a sea-cock forthwith deprived him of a most useful and seaworthy steam launch.
Coke and his merry men became pirates during the early morning of Thursday, September 2d; the curious reader can ascertain the year by looking up "Brazil" in any modern Encyclopedia, and turning to the sub-division "Recent History." On Monday, September 6th, David Verity entered his office in Exchange Buildings, Liverpool, hung his hat and overcoat on their allotted pegs, swore at the office boy because some spots of rain had come in through an open window, and ran a feverish glance through his letters to learn if any envelopes bearing the planetary devices of the chief cable companies had managed to hide themselves among the mass of correspondence.
The act was perfunctory. Well he knew that telephone or special messenger would speedily have advised him if news of the _Andromeda_ had arrived since he left the office on Saturday afternoon. But it is said that drowning men clutch at straws, and the metaphor might be applied to Verity with peculiar aptness. He was sinking in a sea of troubles, sinking because the old buoyancy was gone, sinking because many hands were stretched forth to push him under, and never one to draw him forth.