Gulls make their home on the reefs, laughing gulls and cormorants and great predatory gulls, sailing to seaward in the dawn and clanging home at night after a sweep of hundreds of miles to where the swimmer rocks show white manes, or the Skagways their teeth. The gulls were jeering now as the fisherman hauled in his line, coiled it on the coral and stood up, shading his eyes.
Away over the sparkling blue to s’uth’ard stood something that was either the fin of a sail-fish or the sail of a boat, something sharp and triangular, clear now to the sight and now half gone as the sea-dazzle affected the eyes of the gazer.
He was a tall, thin man, bronzed to the colour of a cobnut, tattooed on the left hand in such a way that he seemed to wear a mitt, and his face as he stood straining his eyes seaward was the face of Uncle Sam, goatee beard and all.
As he watched, the jaws of this individual worked slowly and methodically like the jaws of a cow chewing the cud, then as the boat’s hull showed close in and making for the clear passage through the reefs, he flung up his arms, turned, and came scrambling down over the coral to the salt white beach, towards which the boat was coming now, the sail furled, and oars out and straight for destruction on a rock in the fairway. There were only two men in her.
“Sta’board your helm, you —— fools!” yelled Uncle Sam. “Cayn’t you see the sunk reef before your noses? Sta’board—that’s right.” Then a tone lower: “B——y tailors!”
He rushed out as the boat came barging on to the beach and seized the starboard gunnel, whilst the bow oar, tumbling over, seized the port, and the stern oar, taking to the water, clapped on; then, having dragged her nose well above tide-mark, they turned one to another for speech.
“Well, I’ve been here three months and maybe more,” said the tall man, as they sat on the coral by the beach watching the boat and the strutting gulls and half-a-dozen stray Kanakas who had come down to take a peep at the strangers. “Wrecked?—nuthin’—did a bunk from a hooker that shoved in here for water an’ nuts, and here I’ve stuck, snug as Moses in the bulrushes, nuthin’ to pay for board an’ bunk, no use for a n’umbrella, place crawlin’ with girls, and every pa’m tree a pub, if you know how to make pa’m toddy—name’s Keller, and what might your’n be?”
“Mine’s Harman,” said the bigger and broader of the strangers, “and this is Bud Davis. Reckon we’ve run more’n three hundred miles in that boat, steerin’ by our noses and blind as ballyhoos—and as to where we’ve come from—well, that’s a matter of——”
“Oh, I ain’t askin’ no questions!” cut in the tall man. “It’s nuthin’ to me if you stole your boat or had her give you, or whether you come from Noumea or the Noo Jerusalem. I’m ‘Plain Sailin’ Jim,’ I am, straight with them that’s straight with me, hungerin’ for the sight of a white mug, and fed up with chocolate biscuits. ‘Plain Sailin’ Jim,’ that’s me, and smilin’ I am to welcome gentlemen like yourselves to this virgin home of palm toddy and polygamy.”
“What sort of truck is that?” asked the ingenuous Harman.