“It’s either stick here and work for two dollars a day or get out for the Paumotus,” replied Davis, coming up from a last interview with Mandelbaum. “Which will we do, stick here and work for Mandelbaum for two dollars a day sure money, house, grub and everything found, or put out for the Paumotus in this blessed canoe which his royal highness says we can have in exchange for the ship’s money he’s robbed us of? Which is it to be, the society of Mandelbaum or the Paumotus, which is hell, sharks, tide races, contr’y winds and starvation, maybe?”
“The Paumotus,” said Harman without a moment’s hesitation.
CHAPTER III.
THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN
Have you ever tried to manage a South Sea canoe, a thing not much wider than a skiff, with mast and sail out of all proportion to the beam, yet made possible because of the outrigger?
The outrigger, a long skate-shaped piece of wood, is supposed to stabilize the affair; it is always fixed to port and is connected to the canoe proper in two chief ways, either by a pole fore and aft or by a central bridge of six curved lengths of wood to which the mast stays are fixed; there are subsidiary forms with three outrigger poles, with two outrigger poles and a bridge, but it was in a canoe of the pure bridge type that Bud Davis and William Harman found themselves afloat in the Pacific, making west with an unreliable compass, a dozen and a half drinking nuts, a breaker of water and food for a fortnight.
They had been shot out of a pearl lagoon by the rightful owner and robbed of two double handfuls of pearls which they had collected in his absence. Given the offer of a canoe to go to the devil in or honest work at two dollars a day with board and lodging free, they had chosen the canoe.
They could work; they had worked like beavers for months and months collecting those pearls, but they weren’t going to work for wages.
“No, sir,” said Harman, “I ain’t come down to that yet. Billy Harman’s done signin’ on to be sweated like a gun-mule and hove in the harbour when he’s old bones; the beach is good enough for him if it comes to bed-rock.”
It had certainly come to bed-rock now this glorious morning, two days out and steering into the face of the purple west, the great sun behind them just risen and leaning his chin on the sea line.
Harman was at the steering paddle, Davis forward. They had breakfasted on cold water and bananas, and Billy was explaining to Davis exactly the sort of fools they had been, not in refusing work and good grub and pay, but in having failed to scrag Mandelbaum, the pearl man.