Chapter I

Captain Brent came down to the Karolin as she was lying by Circular Wharf, on some business connected with some gadget or another he was trying to sell on commission. Some patent dodge in connection with a main sheet buffer, I think it was—anyhow, Dolbrush, the owner and master of the _Karolin_, though an old friend, refused to speculate; the thing to his mind “wasn’t no use to him,” and he said so without offence to the salesman.

Brent really carried on this sort of business more for amusement than profit; he had retired from the sea with enough to live on, and it gave him something to do of a morning, pottering round the wharves, boarding ships and boring master mariners, mostly known to him, with plans and specifications of all sorts of labour and life saving devices—he worked for Harvey and Matheson—which they might use or recommend to owners.

He had been, in his time, the finest schooner captain that ever sailed out of Sydney Harbour, a vast man, weather-beaten and indestructible-looking as the Solander Rock, slow of speech but full of knowledge, and, once started on a story, unstoppable unless by an earthquake. He had been partner with Slane, Buck Slane of the Paramatta business; he was Slane’s Boswell, and start him on any subject he was pretty sure to fetch up on Slane. He and Slane had made three or four fortunes between them and lost them.

Putting the main sheet buffer in his pocket, so to speak, he accepted a cigar, and the conversation moved to other matters till it struck Chinks—Chinks and their ways, clean and unclean, and their extraordinary methods of money-making; sham pearls, faked birds——

“There’s nothing the Almighty’s ever made that a Chink won’t make money out of,” said Dolbrush. “Give ’m a worked-out mine or an old tomato tin and he’ll do _something_ with it—and as for gratitude——”

“I’ll tell you something about that,” cut in Brent. “I’ve been to school with them, there’s nothing about them you can tell me right from Chow coffins to imitation chutney. Why me and Slane hit up against them in our first traverse and that was forty years ago. Sixty-one I was yesterday and I was twenty-one when I fell in with Buck. It don’t seem more than yesterday. We’d put in to ’Frisco Bay and were lying at Long Wharf, foot of Third and Fourth Streets. Buck was Irish, as you’ll remember, a fine strapping chap in those days, with blue eyes and black hair, and we’d come from Liverpool round the Horn and we didn’t want to see the ocean again for a fortnight, I tell you. Buck had skipped from Tralee or somewhere or another, and he had forty pounds in his pocket, maybe he’d got it from robbing a bank or something, I never asked, but there it was, and no sooner was the old hooker tied up than he proposed we’d skip, him and me, and try our luck ashore. I hadn’t a magg, but he said he had enough for both, that was Buck all over, and we skipped, never bothering about our dunnage.

“Buck had an uncle in ’Frisco, well to do and a big man in Ward politics. O’Brien was his name if I remember right, and he was reckoned to be worth over a hundred thousand pounds, so Buck said, but he fixed to let him lie, not being a cadger; and we got a room with a widow woman who kept lodgers in Tallis Street and set out to beat up the town and see the sights. There were sights to be seen in ’Frisco, those days, more especial round the dock sides, and the place was all traps, the crimps were getting from fifty to seventy dollars a head for able seamen, and most of the bars and such places were hand in fist with them, but we steered clear of all that, not being given to drink, and got home early and sober with our money safe and our heads straight.

“We’d come to the conclusion that ’Frisco was a bit too crowded for us, and we fixed to try for the Islands. Those days there was money out there. Why, in those days the guano deposits hadn’t been spotted on Sophia Island, and there it was lying, a fortune shouting to be took; copra was beginning to bud, and blackbirding was having the time of its life; China was eating all the sharks’ fins and _bêche de mer_ she could stuff, and then you had the shell lagoons, shell and pearl. ’Frisco was crazy over them, and we heard yarns of chaps turned millionaires in a night by striking an atoll and ripping the floor out. They were true yarns. In those days the Admiralty charts and the Pacific Directory were years behind the times, and there were islands being struck time and again that had never been heard of before.

“We tried round the wharves for a likely ship, but from Long Wharf to Meiggs’ there was nothing but grain carriers cleaning their bilges and Oregon timber schooners unloading pine.

“One day, Buck, who’d been out up town by himself, came home halooing. ‘Mate,’ says he, ‘our fortunes are made.’ Then he gave his yarn. He’d been poking round by China Town when, coming along a street—Alta Street it was—he saw a bunch of Chinks at a corner, two young chaps and an old father Abraham of a Chink with horn spectacles on him. They were standing on the loaf when Buck sighted them, talking, and then they began quarrelling, and the two young chaps set on father Abraham and began pulling him about and kicking him, till Buck sent them flying and rescued the old chap, who was near done in. Then he helped him home. Fong Yen was his name, and he had a little hole of a bird shop just inside China Town by a Chow restaurant. He was real bad, knocked about by those brutes, and full of gratitude; he offered Buck his pick of the birds, but Buck was no bird fancier. Then says Fong: ‘I’ll give you something better than birds,’ and he goes to a drawer in a lacquer box and hunts about and finds a bit of paper. ‘It was given me by my son,’ says he, ‘to keep. He was killed in the riots down at the docks last month; you have been as good as a son to me, take it, it’s a fortune.’ Then he explained. It was the latitude and longitude of a virgin shell island written down by his son who’d been a sailor on one of the Chinese _bêche de mer_ boats. The boat was wrecked and all hands lost with the exception of this chap, who had kept the secret and had been saving up money to go and skin the island when he was killed. Poor old Fong couldn’t work the thing himself; he had no relations, and to give or sell that paper to any of the China Town lot would simply be getting his throat cut, maybe, to keep his head shut on the matter and get the purchase money back. He was quite straight with Buck on this, and told him he was giving him something that was no use to himself now his son was dead, but if Buck chose to give him a few dollars to buy opium with, he wouldn’t be above taking it. Buck takes out his roll and peels off two ten-dollar bills and promises him a pull out of the profits.

“Buck showed me the paper. There was nothing on it but the latitude and longitude of the place and a spot that looked to me like a blood mark. We got hold of a chart from a ship master we’d chummed in with and found the position north-east of Clermont Tonnerre in the Low Archipelago. I said to Buck, ‘It’s all very well—but how are we going to get there? It’s about as much use to us as to the Chink. S’pose we pull some guy in to put up the dollars for a ship, do you think he won’t want the profits? If I know anything of ’Frisco, he’ll want our skins as well. That old Chink was on the right side of the fence, he knew ’Frisco and knew he hadn’t a dog’s chance of getting a cent out of it.’ Buck hears me out, then he says, ‘Do you suppose,’ he says, ‘that when I paid out good money for this thing I had no idea how to work it, do you suppose I have no man to back me?’

“‘Who’s your man?’ says I.

“‘My uncle,’ says he.

“I’d clean forgot the rich uncle. Then I began to see that Buck wasn’t such a fool as I thought him. I knew the way the Irish stick together, and old Pat O’Brien being one of the biggest bugs in the town I began to see the light, as the parsons say, and Buck asking me to go with him that night and lay for the old chap, I agreed.