III
They had favourable winds to south of Bird Island, which is situated north of Nilihau and Kaula in the Hawaiian group, then came a calm that lasted three days, leaving the old Heart groaning and whining to the lift of the swell and the grumbling of Harman, hungry for copra.
“There’s somethin’ about this tub that gets me,” said he. “Somethin’ always happens just as we’re about to make good. I believe Pat Ginnell’s put a curse on her.”
“Oh, close up!” said Blood. “How about Armbruster? I reckon she’s lucky enough; it’s the fools that are in her that have brought any bad luck there’s been going.”
“Well, we’ll see,” replied the other.
As if to disprove his words, an hour later the wind came; and three days later, nosing through the great desolation of blue water between Sejetman Reef and Johnston Island, the Heart of Ireland raised the island. It was midday when the sea-birdlike cry of one of the Chinamen on the lookout brought Blood and Harman tumbling up from the cabin. Yes, it was the island, right enough, and Harman through his glass could make out the tops of palm trees where the sea shimmered.
He held the glass glued to his eye for a moment, and then handed it to Harman.
“I reckon,” said he, “the pa’ms is as plentiful there as the hairs on a bald man’s head. Why, there ain’t any pa’ms!”
Blood swore and closed the glass with a snap.
Even at that distance the poverty of the place in copra shouted across the sea, but it was not till they had drawn in within sound of the reefs that the true desolation of this fortunate island became apparent.
The place was horrible. A mile and a half, or maybe two miles, long by a mile broad, protected by broken reefs, the island showed just one grove of maybe a hundred trees; the rest was scrub vegetation and sea birds.
Strangest and perhaps most desolate of all the features was a line of shanties, half protected by the trees, shanties that seemed gone to decay.
Then, as the Heart hove to and lay sniffing at the place, appeared a figure. A man was coming down the little strip of beach leading from the shanties to the lagoon.
“Look!” said Harman. “He’s pushin’ off to us in a boat. Say, Blood, d’you see any naked Kanaka girls crowned with flowers waitin’ to dance round us?”
“Rafferty’s sold us a pup,” said Blood.
“It’s easy to be seen. We’ll wait. Let’s see.”
The boat, a small one, was clearing the reef, opening and making toward them, the man sculling her looking over his shoulder now and then to correct his course.
Close up, she revealed herself as an old fishing dinghy, battered with wear.
Alongside, the man in her laid in his oars, caught the rope flung to him by Harman, and made fast.
He was a pale-faced, lantern-jawed, dyspeptic-looking person, and he was chewing, for the first thing he did after scrambling on deck was to spit overboard. The next was to ask a question.
“What’s your name?” said he, saluting the afterguard with a nod, and sweeping the deck with his eyes—eyes like the wine-coloured, large, soulless eyes of a hare.
“Heart of Ireland, out of Frisco—what’s yours?” replied Harman.
“Gadgett,” replied the hare-eyed man. “I came out thinking maybe you were bringing news of my schooner, the Bertha Mason. She’s overdue from Sydney. I’m owner here. This island’s mine, leased from the Australian government.” Then, with another look round the deck: “What in the nation are you doing down here anyway?”
“Makin’ fools of ourselves,” replied Harman, “unless we’ve mistook your place for a big copra island that ought to lay in your position. You haven’t heard tell of such an island hereabouts?”
“Look at your charts,” said Gadgett. “This place is only marked on the last British Admiralty charts. There’s nothing round here but water from the Change Time Line to Johnston Island. You’ve come a thousand miles out for copra.”
“What’s your venture here, may I ask?” put in Blood.
“Shell,” replied Gadgett, leaning now against the starboard rail and cutting himself a new plug of tobacco. “I’ve been working this island six years, and had her nearly stripped of shell last spring, but I’ve hung on to clear the last of it. There isn’t much, but I thought I’d take the last squeeze. My schooner is overdue, and when it comes I’m going to clear out for good.”
“Say,” said Harman, “did a chap called Rafferty call here last spring?”
Gadgett turned his eyes to Harman.
“Yes, a chap by that name was here in a schooner. I’ve forgot her name. Blown out of his course by weather, he was, and called for water.”
“Well, now, listen,” said Harman. Then he told the whole story we know.
Gadgett was a good listener. You could feel him putting his hands into the pockets of the yarn, so to speak, and weighing the contents, nodding his head the while, but not saying a word. When it was finished, he took from his pocket the knife with which he had cut the tobacco, opened it, and began cutting gently at his left thumb nail.
“Well,” said he, “it’s pretty clear you two gentlemen have been sold. Brought wheelbarrows here and onion seed and pots and pans; might as well have brought an empty hold for all the trade to be done in this place, for when I’m gone, with the few Kanakas I have with me—they are fishing over on the other side just now—there’ll be nobody here but sea gulls. Rafferty—I see him clear—a big-featured man he was, a questioning chap, too. Well, there’s no doubt about it; he slung you a yarn. But what made him do it?”
“What made him do it!” said Blood. “Why, to guy us all over Frisco and to get right with us over a deal we had with a cousin of his by the name of Pat Ginnell. I’m Irish myself, and I ought to have known how they stick together. No matter, there’s no use in crying over spilt milk. Can we come into your lagoon for a brush-up?”
Gadgett assented. There was a broad fairway, and he steered the Heart himself, the boat following streamed on a line. When the anchor was down, he asked them ashore, and as they were rowing across to the beach said Gadgett: “Do you gentlemen know anything of oyster fishing—shell?”
“No,” said Harman.
“That’s a pity,” said Gadgett, “for if you’d been disposed and knew the business you might have cared to stick here. I put down spat this spring on the whole floor of this lagoon, and the place will be thick with oysters by Christmas. I’d have sold you the remains of the lease—over forty years to run—for a trifle. There’s money to be made here—if you cared to take the thing on.”
“No,” said Harman, rather shortly. “We’re not open to any trade of that sort.”
“Well, there was no harm in mentioning it,” said Gadgett.
He took them up to the frame house in the cocoanut grove, where he lived, and stood drinks. Then he showed them the godown where shell was stored and the Kanakas’ shanties.
Then Blood and Harman went off for a walk by themselves to explore the horrible desolation of the place.
Said Harman, when they were alone: “Skunk—he’s been tryin’ to do us, him and his spat! I know all about oysters, shell and pearl. Why, this place won’t be no use for another fifty years after the way he’s scraped it. He looks on us as a pair of mugs, wanderin’ about with a cargo of wheelbarrows—which we are. But we ain’t such mugs as to pay him good money for lyin’ yarns.”
They walked to the only eminence on the island, a rise of ground some hundred feet above the sea level, and there they stood breathing the sea air and watching the gulls and listening to the eternal song of the surf on the reef.
Then they came back to the beach and hailed the schooner for a boat, which presently put off and took them on board.
Once on deck, Mr. Harman made a dive below into the cabin, and Blood, following him, found him in the act of uncorking a bottle of whisky.
“I’m fair let down,” said Harman, mixing his drink. “It’s not Rafferty, nor the dog’s trick he’s played us, nor the sight of this blasted place that’s enough to give a dromedary the collywobbles. It’s that chap with the yalla eyes. I heard him laffin’ to himself when he went into the house, laffin’ at us. I’ve never been laffed at like that, but it’s not so much that as the chap. He’s onnatural.”
“I want to get back to Frisco and scrag Rafferty,” said Blood, taking hold of the bottle. “That’s all I want.”
“You’ll have to scrag the whole of Frisco, then,” said Harman, “for the place is rockin’ with laughter now, from the China docks to Meiggs’. It’s the wheelbarrows that have done us; they’ll be had against us everywhere, and not a bar you’ll go into but you’ll be asked: Is your wheelbarrow outside? I don’t want to go back to Frisco, I tell you I don’t. I want to get to some place where I can sit down and cuss quiet. Lord, but that chap has had us lively!”
There was no doubt of that fact. Rafferty, with that fatal sense of humour for which he had a reputation of a sort, had well avenged his kinsman, Ginnell, put a hundred dollars into his own pocket, and made Blood and Harman forever ridiculous to a certain order of minds. And his whole working material had been just the recollection of this forsaken island—nothing more than that.