“Now what you fellows ought to do,” he declared, “is to go up the river again and drag it more thoroughly. I think you’d find some more pearls there that would put you well on your feet financially. You could buy some land on the bluff and along the shore and have a larger place. This property will all be much more valuable some day. You could have an automobile, and keep more servants. If you had a bigger and better boat you could put a small crew on it and go anywhere in the world you wanted to.”
He outlined methods of using money that dazzled imagination. Like Moses of old, Sipes and Saunders were shown a land of allurement, from what seemed to them a towering height. It could be theirs, if they had the price, and the price was in the lily-margined channel of the Winding River.
Like most of the rest of humanity, the onion-skinner craved “unearned increment,” and he hoped to inveigle his hearers into procuring it for him. The echo of the coin’s ring—a sound that encircles the world—was in the voice of the tempter, and the old mariners listened as to a siren’s song.
“I’ll go with you, if you’d like to have me,” he declared, “and I’ll pay you a good price for your pearls, as I did before.”
“I’ll tell ye wot we’ll do,” said Sipes. “We ain’t busy now, an’ we’ll take the Crawfish up to our ol’ camp. We’ll take Cookie ’long an’ keep things up. You c’n go out with the flatboat an’ fish fer jools. We’ll stick ’round an’ watch you work, if we don’t git too tired, and we’ll give you a fifth o’ wot you git. We’ll sell our jools to somebody else, an’ w’en you sell your share you c’n fix up with us fer our time. If you don’t find nothin’ you won’t have to pay us much anyway, so it’ll be a good thing fer you.”
While the proposition might have excited the onion-skinner’s admiration, from a professional point of view, he failed to see its advantages to him. He suggested that it might be well to think matters over for a few days, and that he “might drop around again the latter part of the week.”
We helped him push his boat into the lake, and he rowed away, leaving a writhing serpent of discontent at Shipmates’ Rest.
“They’s a good deal in wot that feller says,” declared Sipes. “I don’t think nothin’ o’ him, but jest think wot we c’d do if we had two bar’ls o’ cash-money instid o’ one! We c’d branch out an’ buy this whole cusséd shore. We’d stick up signs and nobody’d dast come on it!”
Saunders was virulent and profane in his comment on “fellers that ain’t satisfied with wot they got, w’en they got all they need, er ever oughta have,” but finally admitted that “they’s a lot more things we might do if we c’d find some more o’ them big pearls.”
That evening the old cronies departed into the moonlight for consultation. John and I sought our couches early. Narcissus took his new mouth organ and ukelele, and strolled off up the beach with Coonie. They had evidently returned sometime before midnight, for I heard loud imprecations being bestowed on the pup by Saunders, who had found him chewing up a deck of cards on the floor, when he and Sipes had come in later. Doubtless Coonie had been ennuied and distrait, and had longed for occupation. With all his sins, he was a lovable little dog, and his good nature and affection made him irresistible. He was fully forgiven in the morning.