In the morning they had been seen by the _Huan Min_, taken on board, were in great danger whilst she was trying to fight the pirates, and were afterwards brought along here.
That was his story, and as I said before, it did not convince me. If the whole scheme had been arranged, and he implied that the skipper of the yacht was the arch villain, how on earth had he allowed Hobbs to escape so easily? He must have known of his enormous wealth, and would surely have kept close guard on him to extort a ransom later on.
However, there was his daughter, and no doubt her hair had been roughly cropped off, and from what I know about women, especially pretty ones, they wouldn’t lose their hair if they could possibly help it, and when I looked across at her, the very picture of innocence, and heard her tell the Skipper how they’d shorn it off, putting her hands through the irregular bits left, her lips quivering, and her eyes filling with tears, I was bound to believe that there was some truth in it.
It was amusing to watch the change in the Skipper’s manner. He had sat down to dinner with a scowl on his face that would have melted the paint off the bulkhead, and snarled whenever he spoke; but now he was telling her all about his wife and daughters, and she was holding up her wrists to show him where they had been bound and bruised, and had completely mollified him.
Presently Hobbs ventured to ask him if he would try and recapture the yacht, and then the Skipper flared up again and roared at him, "that American citizens should get their own ships to do their own dirty work". The Skipper’s language was never too refined, but the little man wasn’t to be browbeaten. "Guess the _Sally Hobbs_ was flying your own red ensign, Captain," he answered defiantly.
"Darn my rags! Why didn’t you say so before?" shouted the Skipper, and got purple in the face. "Those pirates dare touch anything under our flag? I’ll go after ’em to-morrow."
"I rather fancy she was," put in Miss Hobbs. "Poppa and I were in such a hurry, we’d only time to paint _Sally Hobbs_ on the stern and the lifebuoys, and didn’t reckon it counted, altering the registration."
Well, that put matters in a new light, and I felt pleased at the prospect of our taking a hand in the game.