“Oh, shut up,” said Davis, “you’re always going back on things, and you haven’t it in you to scrag a chicken, anyhow; always serving out that parson’s dope about it not paying to run crooked.”
“Nor it don’t,” said the moralist. “There ain’t enough mugs in the world, as I’ve told you more than twice. I don’t say there ain’t enough, but they’re too spread about—now if you could get them all congeriated into one place, I wouldn’t be behind you in waltzing in with a clear conscience an’ takin’ their hides—but there ain’t such a place—— ’Nother thing that queers the pitch is the way sharps let on to be mugs. Look at Clayton.”
“What about Clayton?”
“Well, look at him. In we sails to that pearl shop and there we finds him on the beach. Looked like the king of the mugs, didn’t he, with his big, round face and them blue-gooseberry eyes. ‘Here’s a sealed lagoon for you,’ says he, ‘I’m done with it; got all the pearls I want and am only wishful to get away; take it for nix, I only want your ship in exchange, and we fall to the deal and off he goes.’
“We didn’t know he’d sailed off with all his pardner’s pearls, did we? And when his pardner, Mandelbaum, turns up and collars our takin’s, and kicks us out in this durned canoe after we’d been workin’ months and months, our pitch wasn’t queered—was it? And all by a sharp got up to look like a sucker and be d——d to him. Well, I hopes he’ll fry in blazes if he ain’t drowned before he cashes them pearls. I ain’t given to cursin’, but I could curse a hole in this dished canoe when I thinks of the hand we give him by fallin’ into his trap and the trick he served us by settin’ it.”
“MIND!” yelled Davis.
Harman, in his mental upset, had neglected his steering, and the canoe paying off before the wind nearly flogged the mast out as Davis let go the sheet.
There are two sure ways of capsizing a South Sea canoe—letting the outrigger run under too deep and letting it tip into the air. They nearly upset her both ways before matters were righted, then pursuing again the path of the flying fish, the little canoe retook the wind, tepid and sea-scented and blowing out of the blue north-west.
An hour after sunrise next morning Davis, on the look-out, saw a golden point in the sky away to the south of west. It was the cloud turban of Motul. A moment later Harman saw it too.
“Lord! it’s a high island,” cried he. “I thought there was nuthin’ but low islands in these parts. Where have we been driftin’ to?”