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"To-night I came here straight from Alan Penwenn——"

McGuire straightened, turning quickly toward Williams; but not a flickering of surprise had crossed Williams's face, and he merely continued to look at her and wait.

Penwenn was the owner of many ships. It was through the great wide doors of his firm's warehouses that much of the Orient's exotic merchandise came into the States. The fortune of the Penwenn family had been founded by a hard-boned Scotch grandfather, who had been a great sea-gambler and married the daughter of an old Spanish family. Young Penwenn, as his father and grandfather had done, occasionally turned from regular business to buy up wrecks, listen to tales of lost treasure, and he liked a bit of a gamble—a wee little bit of a gamble; not much of one, for he was cautious, and thought himself a far shrewder man than his father had been.

"'Nada,' Alan said to me not two hours ago, 'you are a little South Sea savage, and you have heard of Hurricane Williams?'

"'Heard of Hurricane Williams!' I said, and would have told him what I really knew, but he gave me no chance.