"Will you come with us, Captain, and afterwards join me at supper?"
"I will, Madame. I would not be absent for a thousand pounds."
"And why should I be left out?" wailed Ewing. "I cannot offer a thousand pounds for my supper. I am a poor man. But if half-a-croon...."
"You shall come for nothing, Sandy," said Madame graciously.
The motor boat was ready shortly after breakfast. With her eight-cylinder forty-horse-power engine she could drive through the surf on the bar between half-flood and half-ebb, and the big curved storm curtain in her bows kept her passengers moderately dry, except at the extreme ends of her tidal range. Willie took on board some sixty yards of thin cotton line wound upon a wooden check winch, which, long since, he had purchased in Thursday Island. The wealth of Willatopy enabled him to improve upon native fishing methods. He fitted the winch upon a piece of stick, and lashed this stick to a thwart of the boat. He explained that by keeping the motor boat broadside on to a sucker-attached turtle—a manœuvre which her dominating speed made easy—he could play the beast over the gunwale from his winch. To his hunting equipment he added four spears—similar to those which had become the terror of intrusive lawyers—and to the shafts of these spears were fastened coils of long stout cord. Turtle hunting a la sucker looked a complicated business, though, according to Willie, the principle was easy of comprehension. One despatched the sucker in quest of a turtle, just as our ancestors flew falcons after heron, played the turtle by way of the sucker's tail and soreback for so long as might be necessary to tire the animal, then at favourable opportunities the spears were thrown, and finally the quarry was brought to boat by means of the cords attached to the shafts of the spears. All this took time, for a turtle in these waters ran up to some four feet in length and two hundred and fifty pounds in weight.
"There is a powerful lot of eating in a turtle," remarked Ewing when these statistical details had been made clear.
"Wonderful eating, too," murmured Ching, and fell into deep contemplation of the divinely copious ambrosia which would reward success in their chase.
"Does the sucker get any reward for its services?" enquired Madame.
"If it is not too far gone," explained Willie, "my brown boys eat it."