Then, as Davis steered and the foam fled astern, the wind, taking the high poop of the junk, slewed her round bow towards them, and showing the great staring, malignant eyes. It was actually as if she had turned to watch them.
“Look at her!” cried Billy, “turnin’ her snout to watch us; she’ll follow us now sure as certain, we won’t have no luck now, we’ll be had somehow or ’nuther, and maybe over that dope! Bud, where was your brains you didn’t think of holin’ and sinkin’ her? Why, if it ain’t anything else we can be had for leavin’ her a-floatin’ derelick and a danger to navigation.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Davis, “you and your derelicts.”
The Haliotis was a schooner of some hundred and twenty tons, and three men can work a schooner of a hundred and twenty tons across big tracts of ocean if they have fine weather, if they have no fear, if they don’t bother to keep a look-out or attend to the hundred and twenty little duties of ordinary ship life. Harman, Bud and Keller filled this bill admirably. The wind changing and blowing from the sou’-east, they ran before it, ran with no man at the wheel, wheel lashed, head sheets taut, mainboom guyed to port, and never a mishap.
They ought to have gone to the bottom, you say; they ought, but they didn’t. The wind changed instead, for the Paumotus, though far to the eastward, still reached them with their disturbing spell breeding unaccountable influence on wind and weather.
Harman had counted up the sovereigns in the chamois leather bag—there were a hundred and twelve. In a private conference with Davis below, Keller taking the deck and the wheel, he settled up with Davis.
“Better split the money now,” said Harman, “hundred and twelve I’ve got, what’s your?”
“Ninety,” said Davis promptly.
Harman was shocked. He’d reckoned that Davis’s share was bigger than his own or he wouldn’t have been so eager to settle up.
“Count ’em,” said he.