The Haliotis with swelled sails and steered by “Plain Sailin’ Jim” and his new Kanaka crew was not only at sea, but far at sea; she had dropped her anchor chain most likely directly they had vanished into the club, or maybe even she had taken the anchor in, Keller cynically sure that falling to drinks, they would hear nothing of the winch.
“Well, it might have been worse,” said Bud that night as they sat smoking on the beach. “He’s got the dope and the cargo and the ship and the crew, but we ain’t destitute. We’ve got the sovereigns. But what gets me is the fact that he’ll net all of ten thousand dollars when he’s sold off that copra and the opium, to say nothing of the hull. Maybe twenty thousand. Oh, he’ll do it and strand those poor devils of Kanakas Lord knows where.”
Harman took out the watch belonging to the captain of the Haliotis from his pocket, and looked at it gloomily. Then as a child comforts itself with its toys, he took the chamois leather bag of sovereigns from his pocket and began to count over the coins.
“I’m not botherin’ about that,” said he, “what gets me, is the fac’ that he’s run crooked with us.”
Davis, looking at the coins and remembering the watch and fountain pen, to say nothing of the coins in his own pocket, smiled darkly. He was about to remark that if Keller had run crooked with them, they had run pretty crooked with Keller, but knowing the mentality of his companion, he saved his breath and lit his pipe.
“That’s what gets me,” said Billy, serious as a deacon and evidently brooding over the sins of the other and shovelling the sovereigns back into the bag, “it ain’t the dope he’s diddled us out of, nor the schooner, which I hopes he’ll bust on a rock, him and his Kanakas, it’s the fac’ that he’s took me in, in my opinions. I reckoned that chap was a white man, I’d a trusted that man with my second last dollar and wouldn’t have wanted to tie no string to it, neither. Outspoken and free he was with his conversation and hidin’ and holin’ in his ways—’nough to make a chap bank for the rest of his natural on hearses an’ deaf mutes. That’s how I’m feelin’. No, sir, it ain’t the dope he’s diddled us out of, nor the——”
“Oh, shut up,” said Davis, and turning on his side and lighting his pipe, he led the conversation towards the club, the excellence of its whisky and the morals of the ladies of Laut.
CHAPTER VI.
PEARLS OF GREAT PRICE!
Mambaya is a French island.
Fancy a white French gunboat in a blue, blue bay, surf creaming on a new moon beach, and a coloured town tufted with flame trees and gum trees and rocketing palms. Purple mountains in the dazzling azure and a perfume of red earth and roses mixed with the perfume of the sea.