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.