Dodd; it'll be telegraphed by the column, and head-
lined, and frothed up, and denied by authority, and
it'll hit bogus Captain Trent in a Mexican bar-room,
and knock over bogus Goddedaal in a slum somewhere up
the Baltic, and bowl down Hardy and Brown in sailors'
music-halls round Greenock. O, there's no doubt you
can have a regular domestic Judgment Day. The only
point is whether you deliberately want to."
"Well," said I, "I deliberately don't want one thing: I
deliberately don't want to make a public exhibition of
myself and Pinkerton: so moral--smuggling opium; such
damned fools--paying fifty thousand for a 'dead
horse'!"
"No doubt it might damage you in a business sense," the
captain agreed; "and I'm pleased you take that view,
for I've turned kind of soft upon the job. There's
been some crookedness about, no doubt of it; but, law
bless you! if we dropped upon the troupe, all the
premier artists would slip right out with the boodle in
their grip-sacks, and you'd only collar a lot of old
mutton-headed shell-backs that didn't know the back of
the business from the front.
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