Captain Shannon by Coulson Kernahan

"But when you had satisfied yourself that there _was_ a man in hiding on the ‘Cuban Queen," says the reader, "and when you had every reason for suspecting that man to be Mullen, why not at once arrest him? Why go to work like Tom Sawyer in ‘Huckleberry Finn,' who, when he wished to rescue Jim the nigger from the woodshed, must needs make a seven days' job of it, and dig the poor wretch out, when it would have been an easy matter to abstract the key and let him out through the door?"

Why? Well, for several reasons, one of which is that the story would then have been shorter and perhaps less interesting. Another is that, though it is true I had good cause to suppose the man in hiding to be James Mullen, I had no actual proof of his identity.