Some hint as to the solution of that problem came even as he stood there at the ship's rail, watching. It came in the form of a shoe, flung from an open port-hole of the Laminian to the deck of the indrawing tug. This shoe—it was a ludicrous, wide-toed, well-worn thing of humble calfskin—was picked up by the epauletted officer of the local comandante, looked at with open disgust, and flung openly overboard. But McKinnon noticed that before this took place, the officer in question had extracted from its wide-toed interior a slip of closely folded paper. He promptly disappeared from sight, in the wheel-house, and when he reappeared, his tug was grating and bumping along the Lamininan's side-plates, heedless of the blasphemous and stentorian imprecations of Captain Yandel, bellowing and gesticulating from his bridge-end.
McKinnon himself neither heard nor noticed any of this. He was too busily engaged in watching the port-hole, from which the shoe had appeared. He saw a boat-hook swung carelessly up to it, a red hand reach out and lift something from the end of it, and the boat-hook continue to scratch along the ship's side-plates as though searching for a hold. Then the tug made fast.
Two minutes later a coffee-coloured official wearing cavalry boots, red-striped, blue denim
