Chapter III

Dolbrush produced drinks and Brent, having refreshed himself and lit a new cigar, proceeded.

“Well, I was telling you—next morning we howked out and by noon that day we were clear of the bar, taking the sea with the Farallones on the starboard beam and all plain sail set. The _Greyhound_ was no tortoise, and for all her dirt she was a dry ship, but that day when we came to tackle the first of the ship’s stores we’d have swapped her for a mud barge and penitentiary rations. Pat must have got the lot as a present, I should think, to take it away. I never did see such junk; it wasn’t what you might call bad, but it was faded, if you get me; not so much stinkin’ as without smell to it—or taste.

“‘All shipowners are bad, and Pat’s a shipowner,’ I says, ‘but there’s no doubt he’s given you a chance in life for the sake of his sister Mary—God rest her soul—the chance of getting ptomaine poisoning if you don’t die first of jaw disease breaking your teeth over this damn bread.’

“‘I’ll be even with him yet,’ says Buck.

“We did some fishing, for we had tackle on board, and that helped us along over the line, and one morning twenty-seven days out from ’Frisco we raised an outlier of the Marqueses. Coming along a week later we raised the spot where pearl island ought to have been—we’d labelled it Pearl Island before sighting it, and that was maybe unlucky—anyhow, there was no island to meet us at noon that day and no sign of one inside or outside the horizon.

“‘That Chink sold you a pup,’ says I to Buck.

“‘Maybe it’s your navigation is at fault,’ says he.

“‘Maybe,’ says I, wishing to let him down gentle, but feeling pretty sure the navigator wasn’t born that could find that island.

“We stood a bit more to the south with a Kanaka in the crosstrees under a reward of ten dollars if he spotted land that day, and towards evening the wind dropped to a dead calm and we lay drifting all that night, the wind coming again at sun up and breezing strong from the south west.

“We put her before it, both of us pretty sick at thinking how Pat was right and how he’d landed us and used us for his purpose. We weren’t mean enough dogs to think of spoiling the cargo or piling the schooner; we just took our gruel, fixing to lay for him with our tongues when we got back, and as for the Chink, well. Buck said he’d skin that Chink if he had to bust up China Town single-handed to do it.

“He was talking like that and it was getting along for eight bells, noon, when the Kanaka look-out signals land, and there it was right ahead, but nothing to be seen only a white thumb-mark in the sky from the mirror blaze of a lagoon.

“Then the heads of cocoanut trees poked up all in a row, and I turns to Buck and we gripped hands.

“‘It’s a hundred and more miles out,’ said I, ‘but I reckon it’s not the island that’s out but me and my navigation; that old Chink was no liar. It’s the Island. Must be, for there’s nothing on the chart for five hundred miles all round here.’

“Well, we’ll see,” said Buck.

“We held on steady, and then the reef began to show, and coming along presently we could hear the boom of it. We couldn’t see a break in it, and getting up close we shifted our helm a bit and came running along the north side, the gulls chasing and shouting at us, the reef foam dashing away only a hundred yards to starboard, and the wind that was filling our sails bending the cocoanut trees.

“I felt like shouting. We could see the lagoon, flat as a looking-glass over beyond the reef that was racing by us; then we came on the break, and putting out a bit we came in close hauled with no tumble at the opening seeing it was slack water.

“It was a fairish big lagoon, maybe four miles by six or so, and since the Almighty put the world together you’d have said we were the first men into it. It had that look. Not a sign of a native house; nothing but gulls. It was fifty-fathom water at the break—made deep by the scouring of the tides; then it shoaled up to twenty and ten, and we dropped the hook in seven-fathom water close on to the northern beach. Not a sign of an oyster. The floor just there was like a coloured carpet with coral, and the water was so clear that every coloured fish that passed had a black fish going along with it—which was its shadow.

“We dropped the boat and pulled off, and we hadn’t got two cable lengths to the west of where the _Greyhound_ was lying when we struck the beds, acres of them.

“I’ve seen the Sooloo fisheries and the Australian, but I reckon the Pearl Island oysters could have given them points as to size. Somewhere about six hundred pairs to the ton they ran, and that’s a big oyster.

“‘Well,’ said Buck, ‘here we are and here we stick. We’ve anchored on top of a fortune and if it takes ten years we’ll hive it.’ That was all very well saying, but we’d got the question of grub to consider, but we soon found we needn’t worry about that; there was fish and turtle and _béche de mer_ and cocoanuts, bread-fruit on the south side and taro, to say nothing of oysters. Having fixed that matter, we set to work. Those Kanakas hadn’t signed on for diving after oysters, but stick a Kanaka in the water and it’s all he wants; besides, we gave them extra pay in the way of stick tobacco, axing open a lot of old Pat’s tobacco cases, sure of being able to pay him out of the pearl money; then we worked like grigs in vinegar, and at the end of the first week’s work we hadn’t found one pearl. The way we did was to put each day’s takings out on the beach in the sun; the sun opened them better than an oyster knife.

“‘Well, this is bright,’ says Buck one day as we were going over the heap. ‘Luck’s clean against us,’ he says, and no sooner had he spoke the words, a whopper of a pearl ’s big as a pistol bullet jumped into his fist out of an oyster he was handling. It wasn’t a big oyster neither. My, that pearl was a beauty; it turned the scale at forty grains I reckon, and it wasn’t the last.

“We were six to seven months on that job, and I never want to strike another pearl lagoon. Me and Slane had at last to do most of the diving, for the Kanakas got sick of it. We looked like Guy Fawkes. When we sailed into that lagoon we were spry young chaps clean-shaved and decently dressed; when it had done with us we were bearded men, men black with the sun and salt water and ragged as Billy be Dam. I tell you we were spectacles. Satan never fixed up such a factory as a pearl lagoon when you have to work it short-handed and on the secret. You can’t stop, not if you only get a pearl in a thousand oysters, you can’t stop. It’s always the one pearl more that does you. It’s like the gambling rooms. Till one day I says to Buck: ‘I’m done.’

“‘I was only waiting for you to say it,’ said Buck. ‘I’ve been done this last week only I wouldn’t give in.’

“We’d got together two hundred and thirty-two pearls and some seeds—the king of the lot was a roseleaf pink pearl; there were two golden pearls that were a perfect match pair, half a dozen blacks, a few yellow that weren’t no use, and the balance white. We’d been looking up prices before we started and got some tips from a man who was in the know, and we reckoned our haul was thirty or forty thousand dollars. You see it was virgin ground, and the things had time to grow to size without being disturbed.

“I ought to have told you the diving dress was no use. Pat had got it from some old junk shop or another, and the pump was as bad, but the water being shallow it didn’t matter much, though if the thing had been in order we’d have got the job through a couple of months earlier.