“Mebbe we’ll cetch a billy-goat if this keeps up,” remarked Sipes.
The old men toiled on with dogged persistence. One Sunday morning an aged bivalve was pulled up and a pearl, over three-eighths of an inch in diameter, fell out on the bench when Sipes’s knife struck the inside of the shell.
“Hoo-ray!!! Here she is!” he yelled.
“Be quiet, y’ol’ miser! Gimme that,” commanded Saunders.
He examined it closely and compared it with the one the wrecked pearl-buyer had given him.
“How much d’ye think that onion-skinner’d give us fer that?” asked Sipes, anxiously.
“It’s about three times as big, an’ it’s rounder. It oughta be wuth fifteen er twenty dollars,” replied Saunders, as he put it with the other specimen and rolled it up in the soiled paper.
“Here, Bill, you can’t do that! Gimme that jool. It’s gotta go in the box.” Saunders surrendered the pearl, and Sipes carefully put it where it belonged.
“We ain’t goin’ to fuss with no button companies, w’en we c’n find them things,” declared Sipes, as he kicked the pile of empty shells overboard. “That ain’t no money fer a jool like that. Wot are you talk’n’ about? You don’t know nothin’ ’bout pearls. I bet it’s wuth a thousand dollars right now, an’ mebbe it’ll be wuth two thousand if we git that feller to peel it. I bet all them jools has to be peeled.”
That part of the pearl-buyer’s talk with Saunders that related to the removal of the layers, and the comparison of a pearl’s structure with that of an onion, had strongly impressed Sipes, and he generally referred to him as “the onion-skinner.”