A minute later he was watching the outrigger canoe being paddled along quickly, its occupants trailing mother-o’-pearl baits behind, and soon after he saw them hook and drag in a fish.
Then Carey turned to gaze at the shore they were approaching with a bitter feeling of resentment arising as he thought of all their labour in the hot sunshine, collecting and piling up the great pearl shells, and more bitterly still as he dwelt upon the tubs of liquid and liquefying oysters which would, he did not doubt, now have quite a thick deposit of pearls at their bottoms.
“Oh, it does seem so hard for that ruffian to get them!” he said to himself, and he sat there with his teeth set, gazing straight before him, till he caught Black Jack’s eyes twinkling laughingly at him as that individual shone like a well-polished pair of boots, and glistened in the sun, while he lustily pulled stroke.
As soon as he caught Carey’s eye he laughed loudly, and in the most perfectly good-humoured way, as if they were the very best of friends, and when the beachcomber was looking another way he raised one hand to go through the pantomime of licking treacle off his fingers and rubbing his front, to the delight of his toiling companions.
It did Carey good, and he smiled back, and nodded.
“I don’t believe they’d hurt me,” he said to himself. “They’re just like a lot of schoolboys, only so much uglier.”
The beachcomber made a movement, and the blacks’ faces were in a flash like so much carved ebony, and they rowed on, choosing as if from old habit the way into the canal-like passage among the rocks, and leaping out at the home-made wharf. Here they held the boat steady in a regular naval style, while their chief and his companions stepped out, the former using the black backs for support, for big and strong as he was his obese state made him far from active.
“That’s the way I taught ’em,” he said, with a grim smile at Carey, who nodded back, said nothing, but thought very deeply, his fancies taking the direction of wondering whether the wretched tyrant would ever go too far with his followers, and they would kill and eat him.
His thoughts took a fresh current directly, for the subject of them shouted the one word, “Buckets!” and after making the boat fast the crew came running with the buckets to where the beachcomber was now standing examining the first tub, which happened to be the last filled, and he growled, moved to the next, and then on and on to the last.
“Here you are, Jack; this first.”