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What would you do were you to find yourself on a stolen sixty-ton ketch off the middle coast of Chile with a crew of Kanakas, less than ten days’ provisions on board, no money to speak of, and a healthy and lively dread of touching at a Chile port?

That was the exact position of Mr. William Harman and his friend, Bud Davis, one bright morning on board the ketch Douro and thirty miles nor’-west of Buenodiaz—about.

The Douro was heading west-nor’-west, the morning was perfect, the Pacific calm, and Billy, seated on the hatch cover, was expressing the opinion that running straight was the best course to adopt in a world where reefs were frequent and sharks abundant.

“No,” said he, “runnin’ crooked don’t pay, nohow. There ain’t enough softies about to make it pay, ain’t enough mugs about, as I’ve told you more’n once. Happy I was on Papaleete beach and then you comes along that night and says, ‘Let’s take Penhill’s ship,’ says you. ‘There she lays, the Araya, sixty-ton schooner, and he drinkin’ himself blind at the club and he can’t touch us,’ says you, ‘for he’s mortal afraid of what I know about him. It’s as safe as cheeses,’ says you, and off we put and out we took her—safe as cheeses, seein’ Penhill couldn’t touch us, weren’t we?”

“Oh, close up,” said Davis.

“I ain’t rubbin’ it in, I’m just tellin’ you. Nobody couldn’t touch us, and bold we put into Buenodiaz, reckonin’ to sell her on the hoof, cargo and all, and she worth ten thousand dollars if she was worth a bean, and then what happens? Pereira offers to buy her, cargo and all, and while you were dickerin’ with him, his daughter hands you that yarn about the Douro havin’ a million dollars in bar gold on board of her, and what does we do?” Mr. Harman’s voice rose a tone or two. “We leaves ten thousand dollars’ worth of ship and cargo and rows over to this old tub, boards her, lifts the hook, cracks on sail and puts out to find nothin’ in them boxes but sand an’ pebbles—half a ton of beach, that’s what them darned turkey bustards had landed on us in swop for a schooner and cargo worth ten thousand dollars if she was piled, let alone ridin’ at her moorings in Buenodiaz harbour.”

“Well,” said Davis, “you needn’t shout it. You were in it as well as me. I guess we were both fools, but we haven’t come off empty-handed—we’ve got a ship under our feet, though we’re in a bad way, I’ll admit. Can’t you see the game that’s been played on us? This hooker is worth four thousand dollars any day in the week; they’ve let us run off with her, they set her as a trap for us, but they’ll want her back. If we put into any Chile port, we’ll be nabbed and put to work in the salt mines while these blighters will get their ship back.”

“Sure,” said Harman, “but we ain’t goin’ to.”

“How d’ye mean?”

“We ain’t goin’ to put into no Chile port.” Davis sighed, rose, went below and fetched up the top of one of the gold-boxes, then with a stump of pencil he drew a rough map of South America, indicating the appalling coast-line of Chile while the ingenuous Harman looked on open-mouthed and open-eyed.

“There you are,” said the map-maker, “a hundred thousand miles long and nothing but seaboard and there we are—nothing but the Horn to the south and Bolivia to the north, and the Bolivians are hand in fist with the Chilians, and, moreover, there’s sure to be gunboats out to look for us. That’s why I’m holding on west. We’ve got to get to sea and trust in Providence.”

“Well,” said the disgusted Harman, “I reckon if Providence is our stand-by and if it made Chile same’s your map shows her, we’re done for. There ain’t no sense in it; no, sir, there ain’t no sense in a country all foreshore stringed out like that, with scarce room for a bathin’ machine, and them yellow-bellied Bolivians at one end of it and the Horn at the other. It ain’t playin’ it fair on a man, it ain’t more nor less than a trap, that’s what I call it, it ain’t more nor less than——”

“Oh, shut up,” said Davis, “wasting your wind. We’re in it and we’ve got to get out. Now I’ve just given you our position: we’re running near due west into open sea, with only ten days’ grub, nothing to strike but Easter Island and the mail line from ’Frisco to Montevideo. We’ve the chance to pick up grub from a ship; failing that, either we’ll eat the Kanakas or the Kanakas will eat us. I’m not being funny. How do you take it? Shall us hold on or push down to Valparaiso and take our gruel?”

“What did you say those mines were?” asked Harman.

“Which mines?”

“Those mines the Chile blighters put chaps like us to work in.”

“Salt mines.”

Mr. Harman meditated for a moment. “Well,” said he at last, “I reckon I’ll take my chance on the Kanakas.”

The Douro had nothing about her of any use for navigation but the rudder and the compass in the binnacle and the tell-tale compass fixed in the roof of the saloon. Pereira, when he had baited her as a trap for the unfortunates to run away with, had left nothing of value. He and the beauties working with him reckoned to get her back, no doubt, as Davis had indicated, but they knew that the fox sometimes manages to escape, carrying the trap with him, so they left nothing to grieve about except the hull, sticks, strings, canvas, bunk bedding and a few tin plates and cooking implements.

So she was sailing pretty blind with nothing to smell at but the North Pole, to use Davis’ words as he spat over the side at the leaping blue sea, while Harman, leaning beside him on the rail, concurred.

The one bright spot in the whole position was the seventeen hundred dollars or so of the Araya’s ship money still safe in Davis’ pocket.

It proved its worth some six days later when, close on the San Francisco-Montevideo mail line, they flagged a big freighter and got provisions enough to last them for a month, then, “more feeling than feet under them,” to use Harman’s expression, they pushed along, protected by the gods of Marco Polo, and the early navigators, untrusting in a compass that might be untrustable through blazing days and nights of stars, smoking—they had got tobacco from the freighter—yarning, lazing and putting their faith in luck.

“Anyhow,” said the philosophic Harman, “we ain’t got no dam chronometer to be slippin’ cogs or goin’ wrong, nor no glass to be floppin’ about and frightenin’ a chap’s gizzard out of him with indications of cyclones and such, nor no charts to be thumbin’, nor no sextan’ to be squintin’ at the sun with. I tell you, Bud, I ain’t never felt freer than this. I reckon it’s the same with money. Come to think of it, money’s no catch, when all’s said and done with, what between banks bustin’ and sharks laying for a chap, not to speak of women and sich, and sore heads an’ brown tongues in the morning. Money buys trouble, that’s all I’ve ever seen of it, and it’s the same all through.”

“Well, that wasn’t your song on the beach at Papaleete,” said Davis, “and seems to me you weren’t backward in making a grab for that gold at Buenodiaz.”

“Maybe I wasn’t,” replied the other, and the conversation wilted while on the tepid wind from the dark-blue sea came the sound of the bow wash answered by the lazy creak of block and cordage.

No longer steering west, but northward towards the line, the Douro brought them nights of more velvety darkness and more tremendous stars, seas more impossibly blue, till, one dawn that looked like a flock of red flamingoes escaping across an horizon of boiling gold, Bud, on the look-out, cried “Land!” and the great sun leaping up astern stripped the curtain away with a laugh and showed them coco-nut trees beyond a broken sea, and beyond the coco-nut trees a misty blue stillness incredibly wonderful and beautiful, till, in a flash, vagueness vanishing, a great lagoon blazed out, with the gulls circling above it, gold and rose and marble-flake white.

Before this miracle Harman stood unimpressed.

“We’d have been right into that darned thing in another hour if the sun hadn’t lifted,” said he, “unless maybe the noise of the reef would have fended us off—hark to it!”

They could hear it coming up against the wind, a long, low rumble like the sound of a far-off train, and now, as the Douro drew in, they could see the foam spouting as the flood tide raced through the passage broad before them, and showing the vast harbour of the lagoon.

“The opening seems all right,” said Davis.

“Deep enough to float a battleship,” replied the other, “and no sign of rocks in it. Shove her in.”

The Douro did not require any shoving. Driven by the wind and tide she came through the break like a gull, and as the great lagoon spread before them they could see the whole vast inner beach with one sweep of the eye.

It was an oval-shaped atoll, a pond, maybe, four miles from rim to rim at its broadest part, heavy here and there with groves of palm and jack-fruit trees, and showing a village of grass-roofed houses by the trees on the northern beach, where, on the blinding white sands, canoes were lying, and from which a boat was just putting off.

“They’ve sighted us,” said Davis.

“Seems so,” replied Harman, running forward to superintend the fellows who were getting the anchor ready, while the Douro, shaking the wind out of her sails, lost way, and the hook fell in ten-fathom water, the rumble of the chain coming back in faintest echoes from the painted shore.

The boat drew on. It was manned by Kanakas naked as Noah, and steered by a white man. A huge man with a broad and red and bulbous face, who came on board leg over rail without a word of greeting, gazed around him with a pair of protruding light-blue eyes, and, then, finding his voice, addressed Harman:

“Where the blazes have you blown in from?” asked the stranger.

“Gentlemen,” said Clayton, for Clayton was his name, and they were all down below sampling a bottle of rum wangled by the genius of Harman out of the purser of the freighter, “Gentlemen, I’m not divin’ into your business. A ship in ballast without charts or chronometer, not knowing where she is, and not willin’ to say where she comes from, may be on the square and may be not.”

“We ain’t,” said Harman bluntly.

“That bein’ so,” said Clayton, quite unmoved, “we can deal without circumlocuting round the show, and get to the point, which is this: I’m wantin’ your ship.”

“Spread yourself,” said Davis, “and tip the bottle.”

Clayton obeyed.

“I’m willin’ to buy her of you,” said he, “lock, stock, barrel and Kanakas, no questions asked, no questions answered, only terms.”

“What’s your terms?” asked Harman.

Clayton raised his head. The wind had shifted, and, blowing through the open port, it brought with it a faint, awful, subtle, utterly indescribable perfume. Far above the vulgar world of stenches, almost psychic, it floated around them, while Harman spat and Davis considered the stranger attentively and anew.

“Oysters,” said Davis.

“Rotting on the outer beach,” said Clayton. “That’s my meaning and my terms. Gentlemen, if you ain’t plum’ fools, the smell of them oysters will be as a leadin’ light to bring you a fortune as big as my own.”

“Open the can,” said Harman.

“Which I will,” replied the other. “I’m straight’s a gun barrel I am, and I don’t want to beat round no bushes, and it’s just this way, gents. The hull of this lagoon is a virgin oyster patch full of virgin oysters, pearl breedin’ and sound, with no foot-and-mouth disease to them. Oloong-Javal is the Kanaka name of the atoll, and it’s on no charts. No, sir, it’s a sealed lagoon, and I struck it two years ago runnin’ from Sydney to Valparaiso, master of the Sea Hawk, with a Chink crew and a cargo of chow truck, put in here for water, spotted the oyster shop, and kept my head shut. Found orders at Valparaiso to ballast and get on to Callao, but I didn’t go to no Callao. I cut loose, fired the mate as a drunk and incapable, which he was, laid out the ship’s money on diving dresses and a pump, hawked back here, landed the equipment, and started in on the pearling.”

“And the Chinks?” asked Harman.

“Comin’ to them, they curled up and died of eating the lagoon fish in the poisonous season, couldn’t keep them off it—you know what Chinks are—and as for the hooker, why sinkin’ gets rid of a lot of trouble, and I took her outside the reef and drilled her.”

“Well, you are a one,” said Harman, shocked, yet intrigued, and vaguely admiring.

“I don’t say that I’m not,” replied Clayton. “I reckon we’re all in the same boat, and plain speaking is best among gentlemen, but cuttin’ all that, let’s get down to tin-tacks. I’ve been working a year and I haven’t skinned more than a patch of the beds. All the same, I’ve made my pile, and I want to enjoy it, I want to have my fun, and if you’re willing I’ll swap the location and the mining rights for this hooker and her crew. I want to get home, and home’s Kisai Island, up north in the Marshalls—and that’s what’s waitin’ for me and has been waitin’ for me three years.”

He took a photograph from his pocket and handed it to the others. It was the photo of a Kanaka girl under a palm tree on a blazing beach.

“Oh, Lord, a petticut!” said Harman in a doleful voice at this sight of ill omen. “A petticut!”

“There ain’t no petticoat about her,” said Clayton—as indeed there was not—“unless the missionaries have been gettin’ at her with their tomfoolery. Oti is her name, and there she sits waitin’ for me, which if she isn’t and has gone and got spliced, I reckon I’ll bust her husband. Well, gents, which is it to be for you, floatin’ round loose in this cockroach trap or a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of pearls to be took for the working?”

“And how are we to get away supposing we stick here and pearl?” asked Davis.

“That’s not for me to say,” replied Clayton. “Something will blow along most likely and take you off, or you can rig up a canoe and make for the Paumotus. I’m just offerin’ the deal, which many a man would jump at, more especial as this old ketch of yours seems to smell of lost property. I ain’t insinuating. I’m only hintin’.”

Davis swallowed the suggestion without sign of taking offence, then he said: “I’ll step on deck with my friend Harman and have a word with him. I won’t be more’n five minutes.”

On deck, Harman suddenly clapped himself on the head. “We’ve left that ballyhoo alone with the rum-bottle,” said he.

“Never mind,” said Davis, “we’re better dry. Now get your nose down to this business while I turn the handle. First of all we want to get rid of the ship; second, we want pearls, not for personal adornment, so to speak, but for profit; third, I believe the chap’s yarn, and, fourth, I vote we close on his offer. What you say?”

“I’m with you on the pearls,” said Harman, “and I’m ready to close on two conditions, and the first is that the beds haven’t been stripped.”

“We’ll easily prove that,” said Davis. “I’ve done pearling and I know the business.”

“Second is,” continued Harman, “that havin’ hived the stuff, we’ll be able to get away with it.”

“Maybe what more you’ll be wanting is a mail boat to ’Frisco and a brass band to play us off. Isn’t Luck good enough to trust in? And look at the luck that’s brought us here. What you want flying in the face of it for?”

“Well, maybe you’re right,” said the other. “The luck’s all right if it holds; question is, will it? I don’t like that petticut flyin’ up in our face; it’s part of the deal, seems to me, since he’s droppin’ this place mainly to get to her, and I’ve never seen a deal yet that wasn’t crabbed if a woman put as much as the tip of her nose into it. I ain’t superstitious. I’m only sayin’ what I know, and all I’m saying is that it’s rum him talking of——”

“Oh, shut up,” said the other, “you’re worse than any old woman. I’m into this business whether or no, and you can stay out if you want. How’s it to be?”

Harman raised his head and sniffed the air tainted with the oysters rotting on the coral. Then he turned to the cabin hatch. “Come on,” said he, and they went below to close the bargain.

Clayton’s house was grass-thatched like the others and situated close to the groves on the right of the village; it had three rooms and a veranda, and mats and native-made chairs constituted the chief furniture. Beyond the house, farther on the right, was the shed where a few trade goods, mostly boxes of tobacco and rolls of print, were stored.

“That’s all there’s left of the stuff I brought with me,” said he; “it’ll carry you on, and I make you a present of it. The Kanakas aren’t used to high wages. A chap will dive all day for the fun of it and half a stick of tobacco, but you can do most of the diving yourselves and save on the business. There are the diving suits, two of them. Good as when I got them, and the pump’s in the boat there; she’s in that canoe house, it’s a Clarkson, in good order. Say, boys, you’ve no reason to sneeze over this deal. Here’s an island, a living larder, pigs and fowl and taro and fish and fruit for nix, a pearl lagoon not half worked, diving suits and pump and a bit of trade, and all for that frousty old brown boat of yours. Was you ever on your feet before?”

“Well, maybe,” said Davis, “we’ve no call to complain if the beds are all right. Let’s put out and look at them.”

They took the Douro’s boat and rowed out, Clayton steering and piloting them.

The beds ran north, acres of them, and one of the Kanakas Clayton had taken with them dived now and then and brought up a pair of shells as a sample.

Big molluscs they were, weighing maybe eight hundred to the ton, of the white shell like the Tahiti oysters.

Davis, who knew something of the business, reckoned that the shell alone was worth five hundred dollars a ton, but he said nothing as the boat, impelled by the sculls, passed through the crystal water.

Every lagoon would be a pearl lagoon but for the fact that the oyster of all sea creatures is the most difficult to suit with a breeding ground. The tides must not be too swift, the floor must be exactly right.

Javal Lagoon was ideal, a bar of reef delaying the floor current and the coral showing the long coach-whip fucus loved by the pearl-seeker. Davis declared himself satisfied, and they rowed back to inspect the mounds of shell and oysters rotting on the beach which were to be thrown in as part of the goodwill of the business.

That night after supper, Clayton showed his pearls. A few of them. He had four tin cash-boxes, and he opened one and disclosed his treasures lying between layers of cotton-wool. You have seen chocolate creams in boxes—that was the sight that greeted the eyes of Harman and Davis, only the chocolate creams were pearls. Some were the size of marrowfat peas and some were the size of butter beans, very large, but not of very good shape, some were pure white, some gold and some rose.

“Don’t show us no more, or I guess we’ll be robbin’ you,” said Harman.

Next morning the pearl-man began his preparations for departure, the water-casks of the Douro were filled, chickens caught and cooped, a live pig embarked and the groves raided for nuts, bananas and bread-fruit.

“It’s well he’s leavin’ us the trees,” said Harman.

The diving suits were got out and Clayton showed them how they were used, also the trick of filling the net bag with oysters in the swiftest way and without tangling the air-tube. The beds were shallow enough to be worked without diving gear, but a man in a diving dress will raise five times as many pairs of shells as a man without in a given time, Clayton explained this. He left nothing wanting in the way of explanations and advice, and next morning, having filled up with provisions and water, he put out, taking the ebb, the Douro heeling to a five-knot breeze and followed past the break by a clanging escort of gulls.

Then Harman and Davis found themselves alone, all alone, masters of a treasure that would have turned the head of Tiffany, and of a hundred and fifty Kanakas, men, women, and children, a tribe captained and led by one Hoka, a frizzy-headed buck whose only dress and adornment was a gee string and the handle of a china utensil slung round his neck as a pendant.

The rotted oysters on the coral were useless, they had been worked over by Clayton. That was the first surprise, the next was the price of labour. Two sticks of tobacco a day was the price of native labour, not half a stick as reported by Clayton.

Trade tobacco just then worked out at two cents a stick, so the pay was not exorbitant; it was the smallness of the stock in hand that bothered our syndicate. But Hoka was adamant. He did not know ten words of English, but he knew enough to enforce his claims, and the syndicate had to give in.

“I knew there’d be flies in the ’intment somewhere,” said Harman, “but this is a bluebottle. We haven’t tobacco enough to work this lagoon a month, and what’s to happen then?”

“No use bothering a month ahead,” replied Davis. “If worst comes to the worst, we’ll just have to do the diving ourselves. Get into your harness and down with you, to see how it works.”

Harman did, and an appalling rush of bubbles followed his descent, the suit was faulty. Tropical weather does not improve diving suits, and Harman was just got up in time.

“Never again,” said he when his window was unscrewed, and he had done cursing Clayton, Clayton’s belongings, his family, his relatives and his ancestors.

“Stick her on the beach; darn divin’ suits, let’s take to the water natural.”

They did, following the practice of the Kanakas, and at the end of the week, when the shells were rotted out, six days’ takings showed three large pearls perfect in every point and worth maybe fifteen hundred dollars, five small pearls varying in value from ten to forty dollars according to Davis’ calculations, several baroques of small and uncertain value and a spoonful of seeds.

“Call it two thousand dollars,” said Davis, when they had put the takings away in some cotton-wool, left by Clayton, and a small soap-box. “Call it two thousand and we’ve had twenty Kanakas diving for a week at two sticks a day, that makes two hundred and eighty sticks at two cents a stick.”

“Well, it’s cheap enough,” said Harman. “Wonder what the unions would say to us and them chaps that’s always spoutin’ about the wages of the workin’ classes—not that I’m against fair wages. I reckon if that guy Clayton had left us enough tobacco, I wouldn’t mind raisin’ the wage bill to eight dollars a week, but we haven’t got it—haven’t got enough to last a month as it’s runnin’ now.”

He spoke the truth. Less than a month left them cleared out, and the Kanakas struck to a man and ceased to dive, spending their time fishing, lazing in the sun and smoking—but their chief amusement was watching the white men at work.

There is no penitentiary equal to a pearl lagoon, once it seizes you, and no galley slaves under the whip ever worked harder than Harman and Bud Davis, stripped to the skin, brown as cobnuts with sun and water, long-haired, dishevelled, diving like otters, and bringing up not more than a hundred pair of shells a day.

The boat had to be anchored over a certain spot, and as the work went on the anchorage had to be shifted; at the end of the day the oysters had to be brought ashore and laid out on the coral to rot. Then, too tired, almost, to smoke, the Pearl Syndicate would stretch itself under the stars to dream of fortune and the various ways of spending money.

The imaginative Harman had quite definite views on that business—diamonds and dollar Henry Clays, champagne and palatial bars, standing drinks to all and sundry and a high time generally, that was his idea. Davis, darker and more secretive, had higher ambitions roughly formulated in the words, “More money.” Dollars breed dollars, and great wealth was enough for him. He would spend his money on making more, sure in his mind that if he once got his foot again in ’Frisco with a pocketful of money, he would find his way out through the big end of the horn.

And so they went on till at the end of four months, taking stock of their possessions, they found themselves forty thousand dollars up, to use Davis’ words.

Taken by the hands of the Kanakas in the first month and by their own hands in the three succeeding months, they had safely hived forty-seven white and perfect pearls, two golden pearls, one defective, some red pearls not worth more than a shilling a grain, and, king of the collection, a great black pearl pear-shaped and perfect and equal to any Mexican in lustre and value. There were also some baroques of extraordinary shapes and a quantity of seeds.

Of the forty-seven white pearls, four were of very large size. Davis had no scales, but he reckoned that these four and the black were worth all the rest put together.

The general stock-taking brought an end to their luck, and for weeks after the take was a joke, to use Davis’ expression. It is always so in pearling; a man may make a small fortune out of a fishery in a few months, but the take is never consistent, and if he strikes it rich at first, it is ten to one he will have to pay for his luck.

One morning, just as the sun was freeing himself from the reef and the last of the gulls departing for their deep-sea fishing grounds, Harman, who had been to draw water from the well, suddenly dropped the bucket he was carrying, shaded his eyes and gave a shout that brought Davis from the house.

Davis looked to where the other was pointing, and there far off to the north and lit by the newly-risen sun stood a sail.

They had been praying for a ship for the last fortnight, speculating on the chances of anything picking them up before they died of hope deferred and loneliness and a diet of fish and vegetable truck, yet now, before that sail hard on the blue and evidently making towards them, they scarcely felt surprised, and were too troubled to be filled with joy; for it suddenly occurred to them that pearls were pearls—that is to say, wealth in its most liftable form.

“Say, Bud,” cried Harman, “we’ve got to hide them divin’ dresses. If these chaps ain’t on the straight and they sniff pearls, we’ll be robbed sure and shoved in the lagoon. I never thought of that before. We’re sure marks for every tough till we’ve cashed in and banked the money.”

“You aren’t far wrong,” replied Davis, still contemplating the sail. “Yes, she’s making for here, and she’s all a hundred and fifty tons. Inside two hours she’ll be off the reef and we’ve no time to waste.”

Most of the island Kanakas had gone fishing the night before to the other side of the atoll, so there were only a few old women and children about to mark the actions of the Pearl Syndicate.

First they dealt with the boat that held the pump, sinking it by the inner beach in four-fathom water at a point where the trees came down right across the sands.

Then, carrying the diving suits, they dumped them in a fish-pool off the outer beach. Having done this, they divided the pearls, making two parcels of them, and surprisingly small parcels they were considering their value.

“Now,” said Harman, when all was done, “we’re shipwrecked chaps blown ashore, we don’t know nothing about pearls, and we reckon the house and go-down were built by some trader the Kanakas has murdered. How’s that for a yarn to sling them; but what’s the name of our ship?”

“The Mary Ann Smithers,” replied Davis promptly, “from Tampico to ’Frisco, cargo of hides and wool, badly battered off the Horn, old man’s name Sellers, and driven out of our course by the big gale a month ago. There wasn’t any gale a month ago, but it’s a million to one they were a thousand miles off then, so how are they to know?”

“You were second officer,” said Harman.

“No, I was bo’sun; second officers are supposed to be in the know of the navigation and all such. I was just bo’sun, plain Jim Davis.”

“Well, they won’t dispute you’re plain enough,” said Harman. “But you ain’t the cut of a bo’sun, not to my mind, cable length nearer you are to the look of a Methodis’ preacher or a card sharp—no need to get riled—be a bo’sun and be darned, be anythin’ you like. I’m an A.B. hopsacker, British born and—here they are.” The fore canvas of the schooner was just showing at the break.

She came in laying the water behind her as though she had a hundred square miles of harbour to manœuvre in, then the wind shivered out of her canvas and almost on the splash of the anchor a boat was dropped.

Harman and Davis watched it as it came ashore, noted the stroke of the broad-backed Kanaka rowers and the sun helmet of the white man in the stern and his face under the helmet as he stepped clear of the water on to the beach.

Mandelbaum was the name of the newcomer, a dark, small man with a face expressionless as a wedge of ice. He wore glasses.

As he stepped on to the sand he looked about him in seeming astonishment, first at Harman, then at Davis, then at the house, then at the beach.

“Who the devil are you?” asked he.

“Same to yourself,” replied Harman, “we’re derelicks. Hooker bust herself on the reef in a big blow more’n a month ago. Who are you?”

“My name is Mandelbaum,” replied the other.

“Well, come up on the verandy and have a drink,” said the hospitable Harman, “and we can have a clack before goin’ aboard. You the captain of that hooker?”

“I am,” said Mandelbaum.

“Then I reckon you won’t mind givin’ us a lift. We’re not above workin’ for our grub—set down till I get some drinkin’ nuts.”

There was a long seat under the veranda, the house door was at the westward end of the house and the seat ran from the door to the eastern end. It was long enough for, maybe, ten people to sit on comfortably, and the three sat down on the seat. Harman having fetched the nuts, Mandelbaum threw his right leg over his left knee and turning comfortably and in a lazy manner towards the others, said:

“Where’s Clayton?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Harman.

Davis said nothing. His mouth fell open, and before he could shut it Mandelbaum got in again.

“Don’t go to the trouble of trying any monkey tricks, there’s half a dozen fellows with Winchesters on that schooner. Your bluff is called. Where’s Clayton, my partner? He and a year’s taking of pearls ought to be here. I bring the schooner back with more trade goods and he’s gone, and I find you two scowbarkers in his house and serving strangers with your damn drinking nuts.” A venomous tang was coming into the steady voice, and a long slick Navy revolver came out of his left-hand coat pocket into his right hand, with the nozzle resting on his right knee.

“Where’s Clayton, dead—but where, where have you planted him, and where have you cached the pearls?”

“Cached the pearls?” suddenly cried Harman, finding his voice and taking in the whole situation. Then he began to laugh. He laughed as though he were watching Charlie Chaplin or something equally funny. He was. The picture of Clayton stood before him. Clayton making off with his partner’s share of the pearls, and handing the island and the fishing rights to him and Davis in return for the ketch, the picture of Davis and himself working like galley slaves, doing four months’ hard labour for the sake of Mandelbaum, for well he knew Mandelbaum would make them stump up to the last baroque.

Then he sat with his chin on his fists, spitting on the ground, while Davis explained and Harman soliloquised sometimes quite out aloud: “No, it ain’t no use; straight’s the only word in the dictionary. No darn use at all, ain’t enough mugs—and a petticut on top of all——”

“Well, what’s the ‘ultermatum’?” asked Harman, a day later, as he stood by a native canoe on the beach.

“It’s either stick here and work for two dollars a day or get out for the Paumotus,” replied Davis, coming up from a last interview with Mandelbaum. “Which will we do, stick here and work for Mandelbaum for two dollars a day sure money, house, grub and everything found, or put out for the Paumotus in this blessed canoe which his royal highness says we can have in exchange for the ship’s money he’s robbed us of? Which is it to be, the society of Mandelbaum or the Paumotus, which is hell, sharks, tide races, contr’y winds and starvation, maybe?”

“The Paumotus,” said Harman without a moment’s hesitation.