CHAPTER III.
THE BARON INTERVENES.
The fashionable Carleton was unfamiliar territory to the inquisitive mariners, but they strolled boldly through the corridors until they fetched up in front of a desk presided over by an immaculate clerk with a languid manner, who coldly regarded them, and appeared indifferent to their wants. After waiting for several minutes for some recognition, Captain Michael O'Shea sweetly remarked:
"Will ye answer a civil question, or will I climb over the counter and jolt you wide awake?"
The languid person looked attentively at the resolute features and masterful eye of the speaker, and hastily responded:
"Beg pardon—beg pardon—what can I do for you, sir?"
"Tell me if a king is stopping in this hotel of yours, and does he have a minister of finance called Baron Strothers?"
"Ah, you mean his majesty, King Osmond of Trinadaro." And the clerk delivered these resounding syllables with unction. "Yes, he is a guest of the hotel."
"He is a real one—do you get that?" soberly whispered O'Shea to his comrade before he again addressed the clerk:
"We wish to see him on important business. We will write our names on a card."
"Baron Strothers receives such callers as are personally unknown to his majesty," the clerk explained.
"We don't wish to see the young man," said O'Shea.
"My orders are to send all cards and messages to him."
The two visitors drew apart from the desk, and put their heads together.
"The minister of finance will not let us get within a cable's length of his boss if he thinks we are seafaring men," whispered O'Shea.
"The swindler may have took notice of us in the Jolly Mermaid," growled Johnny Kent. "We might send up a card, and make headway as far as this Strothers person. Then I could knock him down, and sit on his head while you rummaged the royal apartments and found the king."
"Your methods might strike these hotel people as violent, Johnny. You're a good man at sea, but I would not call ye a diplomat. Anyhow, we will take a chance on running the blockade that this crooked minister of finance has established to prevent honest men from talking to his employer."
Returning to the desk, O'Shea picked up a pen, and wrote on a blank card:
Captain Michael O'Shea and John Kent, Esq., U. S. A., to see King Osmond on a matter that he will find interesting.
Promptly in answer to this message came word that Baron Strothers would see the gentlemen. A hotel attendant conducted them to a suite of rooms on the second floor which must have cost the royal treasury a pretty penny. At the threshold of a sort of anteroom they were met by the brisk, self-possessed young man, who gazed sharply at the sturdy, sunburned strangers, hesitated a trifle, and invited them to enter. Offering them cigars, he bade them be seated, and again scrutinized them, as if striving to recall where he might have seen them before.
Captain O'Shea, at his ease in any company or circumstances, and particularly now when he held the whip hand, asked at once:
"Are we to have the pleasure of paying our respects to his majesty?"
"You Americans are so jolly informal," smiled the minister of finance. "This sort of thing is done only by special appointment. An audience is arranged beforehand if I consider it worth while."
"But this king of yours takes a special interest in ships and sailors," suggested O'Shea. "And we have information that he will find useful."
Baron Frederick Martin Strothers changed color just a trifle, and his manner was perceptibly uneasy as he explained:
"I am awfully sorry, but he is not in at present. He will be disappointed, I'm sure. You are shipmasters or something of the sort, I take it."
"You guess right," was the dry comment of O'Shea. "I have heard that you are fond of talking to seafaring men yourself."
The shot went home. The young man moved in his chair, and looked painfully uncomfortable. Nervously twisting a cigar in his fingers, he replied:
"Ah, yes, now I know! You must have seen me at the East India Docks."
"There or thereabouts; but no matter," said O'Shea. "His majesty is not in, you say. And when will he be in the hotel again?"
"Not for several hours, I fancy. He went out with the minister of foreign affairs to keep an important appointment. Will you state your business to me? That is the customary procedure, you know."
Johnny Kent was for denouncing the young man to his face in a vocabulary well stored with brimstone; but O'Shea nudged him, and smoothly made answer:
"It would please us better to see the king himself. We will come again, or we can look for him on his way in and out of the hotel."
The young man could not dissemble signs of impatience to be rid of these pertinacious intruders.
"If you have a ship to sell, or you are looking for positions, this is only wasting time," said he. "I presume you heard something of our errand among the docks."
"Yes, we have heard of it." And O'Shea bit off the words. "Well, Johnny, shall we go below and wait till his majesty heaves in sight? This minister of finance will give us no satisfaction. And I am not used to dealing with understrappers."
"You are impertinent!" cried the young man. "I have been as courteous as possible. You will leave at once, or I shall ask the hotel management to put you out."
Up from a chair rose the massive bulk of Johnny Kent, and his ample countenance was truculent as he roared, in a voice like a gale of wind:
"You'll throw us out, you pin-headed, half-baked, impudent son of a sea cook? No, Cap'n Mike, I won't shut up. I ain't built that way. Diplomacy be dog-goned! I'm liable to lose my temper!"
"'Tis a large-sized temper to lose, and I hereby hoist storm signals," said O'Shea, with a grin, as he neatly tripped the minister of finance, who was endeavoring to reach an electric push button and summon the police.
The fervid declamation of Johnny Kent must have echoed through the apartments. It sufficed to attract the notice of a spare, erect, elderly gentleman in another room, who opened a door and stared curiously at the strenuous tableau. At sight of the kindly, refined face with the snowy mustache and imperial, O'Shea gleefully shouted:
"The king—God bless him! So this bright young minister of finance was a liar as well as a thief!"
Comically abashed, Johnny Kent mumbled an apology for making such an uproar, at which the elderly gentleman bowed acknowledgment, and said to the perturbed and rumpled Strothers:
"My dear baron, will you be good enough to explain?"
"These ruffians insisted on seeing you, and when I tried to discover their business they called me names and assaulted me," sputtered the young man, in a heat of virtuous indignation. "I was about to have them ejected."
"He was afraid of the truth," cried O'Shea. "We came to tell your majesty that he has cooked up a job to cheat ye out of six thousand pounds, and we can prove it up to the hilt. We caught him with the goods."
"That sounds a whole lot better to me than diplomacy," approvingly exclaimed Johnny Kent.
Bewildered by the vehemence of these outspoken visitors, King Osmond I. of Trinadaro turned to the sullen minister of finance, and inquired, still with his sweet kindliness of manner:
"These men do not look like ruffians, my dear baron. They impress me as having more than ordinary intelligence and force of character. What are their names, and who are they? And what is the meaning of this grave charge they bring against your integrity?"
"I am O'Shea, shipmaster, hailing from the port of New York," spoke up the one.
"I am Johnny Kent, chief engineer to Captain Mike O'Shea," said the other, "and I hail from the State o' Maine. And we can show you our papers. We didn't lose 'em in the Bay of Biscay."
Strothers stood biting his nails and shifting from one foot to the other, for once stripped of his adroit, plausible demeanor; nor could he find, on the spur of the moment, the right word to say. The royal personage said it for him:
"I think you had better retire. I wish to hear what Captain O'Shea and Mr. Kent may have to say to me."
The amiable monarch was unconsciously swayed by the virile personality of O'Shea, who dominated the scene as if he were on the deck of his own ship.
Baron Frederick Martin Strothers made a last attempt to protest, but Johnny Kent glared at him so wickedly, and O'Shea moved a step nearer with so icy a glint in his gray eye, that there was a moment later a vanished minister of finance.