“Appleby was a chap with a fresh red face on him, a Britisher, hailing
from Devonshire and just in from the Islands. He’d been supercargo on
a schooner trading in the Marshalls or somewhere that’d got piled on a
reef by a drunken skipper and sea battered till there wasn’t a stick
of her standing and everyone drowned but Appleby and the Kanaka
bo’sun. He was keen to tell of his troubles and had a thirst on him,
and there he stood lowering the bilge Johnstone passed over to him and
trying to interest strangers in his family history and sea doings.
Logan was behind the bar with Johnstone, and Logan, listening to the
chap clacking with a half-drunk bummer, suddenly pricks his ears. Then
he comes round to the front of the bar and listens to his story, and
takes him by the arm and walks him out of the place on to the wharf
and sits him on a bollard, Appleby clacking away all the time and so
full of himself and his story, and so glad to have a chap listening to
him, and so mixed up with the whisky that he scarce noticed that he’d
left the bar.
“Then, when he’d finished, he seen where he was, and was going back
for more drinks, but Logan stopped him.
“‘One moment,’ says Logan, ‘what was that you were saying about pearls
to that chap I heard you talking to. Talking about a pearl island, you
were, and him sucking it in; don’t you know better than to give shows
like that away in bars to promiscuous strangers?’
“‘I didn’t give him the location,’ hiccups the other chap, ‘and I
don’t remember mentioning pearls in particular, but they’re there sure
enough and gold-tipped shell; say, I’m thirsty, let’s get back for
more drinks.’
“Now that chap hadn’t said a word about pearls, but he’d let out in
his talk to the bummer that down in the Southern Pacific they’d struck
an island not on the charts, and he had the location in his head and
wasn’t going to forget it, and more talk like that, till Logan, sober
and listening, made sure in his mind that the guy had struck
phosphates or pearls, and played his cards according.
“‘One moment,’ says Logan. ‘You’ve landed fresh with that news in your
head and you’re in ’Frisco, lettin’ it out in the first bar you drop
into—ain’t you got more sense?’
“‘It’s not in my head,’ says the other, ‘it’s in my pocket.’
“‘What are you getting at?’ says Logan.
“‘It’s wrote down,’ says Appleby. ‘Latitude and longitude on my
notebook, and the book’s in my pocket. Ain’t you got no understanding?
Keeping me here talking till I’m dry as an old boot. Come along back
to the bar.’
“Back they went, and Logan calls for two highballs, giving Johnstone
the wink, and he takes Appleby into the back parlour and Johnstone
served them the highballs with a cough drop in Appleby’s, and two
minutes after that guy was blind as Pharaoh on his back on the old
couch—doped.