“Well,” said the old hag, “I reckon ye’re satisfied now that we know this business better’n you do. He told ye there wasn’t no pearl in this river.”
“No;” added her hopeful son, “an’ come to think of it, how’d I ever know you had a hundred dollars? I ain’t seen it yet. But we’ve done, so let’s see it now.”
I quietly opened my pocketbook and took several bills of that yellow-backed denomination, and selected one for him. He took it at first suspiciously, then greedily, and I saw his eyes go to my wallet. “I forgot,” said I, and took out two bills of five dollars each, which I handed to him.
“By golly!” said he, “so’d I forgot!”
“Why did you forget about your wages?” I asked, and looked at him keenly. He turned his eyes aside.
“This fresh-water pearl fishing,” said I, “has many points of likeness to the ocean pearl fishing in Ceylon.”
“You been there?” he queried. “And why is it like them?”
“In several ways. It is, in the first place, all a gamble. The pearl merchants buy the oysters as I bought my mussels, by the lump and as a chance, based on the law of average product. They rot the oysters as you do the mussels. The smell is the same: and many other things are the same. For instance, it is almost impossible to keep the diver from stealing pearls, just as it is hard to keep the Kafirs from stealing the diamonds they find in the mines.”
I still was looking at him closely, and now I said to him mildly, and in a low tone of voice, “It would be of no use—I should only beat you again; and I would rather spare your mother. You see,” I added in a louder tone of voice, “the natives put pearls in their hair, between their toes, in their mouths—although they do not chew tobacco as you do. One who merely put one in the pocket of his overalls—if he wore overalls—would be called very clumsy, indeed, especially if he had been seen to do it.”
Involuntarily, he clapped a hand on his pocket. What would have been his next act I do not know, for at that moment I heard a voice call out sharply, “Halt! villain. Throw up your hands, or by heavens you die!” Turning swiftly, I saw Lafitte, his pistol barrel rested in very serviceable fashion in the crotch of a staff, the same as when he first accosted me on my stream, glancing along the barrel with an ominous gray eye again gone three-cornered.