Chapter Fourteen.
The weather was glorious, and the days glided by in what would have been a luxurious life had it not been for the busy, investigating spirit which kept them active.
For they were in the midst of abundance. The well-stored ship, victualled for a couple of hundred people, offered plenty for three, while from sea and land there was an ample supply in the form of fish, fowl, and eggs, both birds’ and turtles’, places being discovered which were affected by these peculiar reptiles, and where they crawled out to deposit their round ova in the sand, while a fine specimen could be obtained by careful watching.
Then, too, there was an abundant supply of fresh water easily to be obtained by taking a water cask up the river on the raft.
As Carey’s injury mended he was restlessly busy either superintending the pearl fishing, whose results were visible in half-a-dozen casks sunk in the sands and an ever-increasing stack of the great shells carefully ranged in solid layers by Bostock, to whom fell the lot of pouring water in the casks and giving their contents a stir-up from time to time.
“Smell, sir?” he said, in answer to a remark from Carey, who always went carefully to windward. “Oh, I s’pose they do; so does fish if you keep it too long, but I don’t mind.”
“But it’s horrid sometimes,” said Carey; “and if it wasn’t for the pearls I wouldn’t have anything to do with the mess.”
“Dirty work brings clean money, my lad; and if you come to that, the fresh lots of shells I piles up don’t smell like pots of musk. But it’s all a matter o’ taste. Some likes one smell, and some likes another, and then they calls it scent. Why, I remember once as people used to put drops on their hankychies as they called—now, what did they call that there scent, my lad?”
“Eau de Cologne.”