“There you are,” said Harman, “if the native ‘Marys’ can dress like that, what price the top folk? I tell you the place is rotten with money only waitin’ to be took. Question is, how?”
Davis did not answer for a moment, he was watching an opulent looking American tourist in white drill who had just left the Island headdress shop across the way. The tourist opened a white umbrella with a green inside and passed away towards the sea.
“No-how,” said Davis, “unless you set to work and open a shop or something, you can’t skin a town like this same as a pearl lagoon. If you want money here, you’ll have to work blame hard for it buying and selling against chaps that are bred to the business better than you—that’s civilisation.”
“Dam civilisation!” said Harman.
“Unless,” continued Davis, “you can fake up some swindle or another——”
“Nothin’——” said Harman, “I’m agin that sort of game as you ought to know, seein’ you know me. No, sir, I don’t want no first class ticket to Noumea. Straight as a gun barrel is what I want to run, but I’ve no objections to putting a few slugs in the gun. It’s just crawlin’ into my head that a syndicate is what we want.”
“And what the devil do you want a syndicate for?” asked Davis.
“Well, it’s this way,” said Billy. “A matter of ten years or so ago in the ’Frisco elections, I was in with Haffernan, Slungshot Haffernan, the chap that was tried for the killin’ of Duffy Stevens at San Leandro which he did, but got off owin’ to an alibi. Well, I’m tellin’ you. My job was fillin’ the ’lectors with gin an’ gettin’ them to the polls before they’d lost the use of their pins and swearin’ false evidence and such on, which wasn’t what a chap would do only in ’lection times.
“Well, a month or so after, Haffernan he got up a syndicate to run a guano island he’d got the location of and which wasn’t there, and I put fifty dollars into it and fifty other mugs did ditto and Haff pouched the coin and turned it over to his wife and went bankrupt or somethin’, anyhow he had the coin and we were left blowin’ our fingers. Now you listen to me. How about that pearl island Mandelbaum kicked us off? We’ve got the location. How about sellin’ it to a syndicate?”
“Where’s your syndicate?”