“Wouldn’t tell me your plans, would you? So full of hitting Schumways you had no thought of anything else, weren’t you? Well, you sainted fool, what about that ambergris?”
“What ambergris? Oh, Lord! the ambergris,” said the wretched Harman, suddenly remembering. “We’ve left it behind!”
“You’ve left it, you mean. What would it have cost to have taken two Chinks down and fetched it up and stowed it in the boat? Not a nickel—and it was worth twenty thousand dollars.”
Harman said nothing. The Oskosh was making her last plunge and the over-loaded boats were making for shore, then his face slowly brightened as the face of Sellers and the face of Schumways rose before him—the two men who had forcibly introduced him to work. “It was worth it,” said he; “if it was five hundred dollars an ounce, it was worth it.”
“What was worth it?” asked Davis.
“Losin’ that ambergris,” replied Mr. Harman.
CHAPTER V.
A DEAL WITH “PLAIN SAILIN’ JIM”
He was the only blot on the scenery, also he was fishing, fishing from a rock washed by water forty feet deep in which the coloured bream passed like jewels through a world of crystal.
Matadore Island clings to its old Spanish name, though it is French, lying west of Vavitu in the great French sea territory born of the League of Nations that stretches now from the Marquesas to Rapa and from Bellinghausen to Gambier.
It is a tiny island, too small for trade, horned with dangerous reefs, but beautiful with the green of Jack-fruit tree and coco palm, the blue of sea and the white of foam and coral.