“Oh, bother! Stinks and rotten 'Last Rose of Summer' are driving me mad. I could stand lots of both if we were doing well. They might be forty overproof and played by forty bands, and every darned piccolo of them out of tune, if only we were making money. Come, let's up stick and away. We can't do worse and we might do better on that bit of 'reef Mammerroo talks about. Here, Mammerroo, stop that blasted corroboree! Come and tell us where that little fella reef sit down.”
Mammerroo shuffled down to the hatchway covering and traced a chart of the locality with a grimy forefinger.
“That fella reef sit down 'nother side Red Hill alongside mainlan'. No deep water. Plenty mangrove—my word full up pigeon. Reef him little fella. Full up tit fish, calla-calla, mainlan' black. Fill'um up boat. Take'm alonga Thors'dilan'. Come back. Fill'm up one time more. Too much. Full up.”
“The same old yarn. I've been all over that ground. There's no reef there, and if there had been it would have been found and skinned years ago,” said dogmatic Billy, with a sneer.
“I see,” said Jim; “the season's over as far as you are concerned. You can go where you like. I'm sick of it now.”
TROPIC DAYS
The next morning saw the NAUTILUS scudding before a strong south-east breeze, Jim, true to his name, sulky as a toad-fish. The good wind harped on the rigging as Mammerroo tirelessly lagged after the ever evasive tune. Jim heard him not. Billy, in a rage, was inclined to bundle the boy and his battered instrument overboard, for he saw in the race north nothing but a waste of time.
Three days later the NAUTILUS anchored to the north of Red Hill under the lee of a low mangrove island uproarious with nutmeg pigeons.
All hands turned out to prospect, with Mammerroo as pilot. He was not long in locating the reef—a forgotten and neglected patch that teemed with fish. Béche-de-mer lay in shallow water, thick and big, by the ton.. The reef, with its clear sandy patches, seemed to be the gathering-ground, the metropolis, the parliament of the curious creature which makes feeble eddies with its distended gills, moves with infinite and mysterious deliberation, and which, though it may be two feet long and three inches thick, can pass through a half-inch space, constricting its bulging body during the progress.
The mangroves of the islet provided the best of fuels for the preservative smoke. The fortnightly steamer passed not so very far out, so that it would be possible to send away a couple of tons at a time without leaving the locality or suspending work for more than an hour or two.