“I don’t know,” said Billy, “but it seems to me it’s to be found for lookin’ in a place like this where you see chaps like that guy with the white umbrella. I saw his Siamese twin on the beach when we landed with a diamond the size of a decanter stopper in his shirt front and that Jew chap that sold us the clothes told me there’s no end of Americans come here rotten with money, to say nothing of Britishers.”
“Well,” said Davis, “even supposing you get your syndicate, what about Mandelbaum? He’s got a lease of the island and would hoof you and your syndicate into the sea if you showed a nose in the lagoon.”
“He said he had a lease,” replied Harman, “but he never showed a line of writin’ and I believe he was a liar, but I wasn’t proposin’ to go there, only to sell the location; if he hoofs the syndicate into the sea, why, it’s their look-out. If they ain’t fools they’ll hoof him in first, lease or no lease, and collar the pearls he’s been takin’.”
“What I like about you is your consistency,” said Davis.
“What’s that?” asked Harman.
“The way you stick to your guns. You’re always preaching that it’s best to run straight and then you turn up an idea like that. Nice straight sort of business, isn’t it?”
“As straight as a gun barrel,” said Harman enthusiastically. “You can’t be had no how, not by all the lawyers from here to Oskosh. Y’see, if chaps are mugs enough to pay coin down for a location you’re free to take their coin. That’s good United States law. I had it from Lawyer Burstall when we got stung over the Haffernan business. He’s a toughs’ lawyer, long thin chap, not enough fat on him to grease the hinges of a pair of scissors, and cute enough to skin Jim Satan if he got a fair grip of his tail.”
“Maybe,” said Davis, “anyhow before you start in on any of your games, we’ve got to get lodgings. I’m not going to fling my coin away on one of these hotel sharps and we’ve got to get some dunnage to show up with. That Jew chap told me where we could get rooms cheap, last house end of town on right-hand side and with a big tree fern in the garden.”
Living is cheap in Mambaya, where people mostly subsist on coco-nut milk and fried bananas, where you can get a hundred eggs for half a dollar and a chicken for a quarter. If you are an æsthete you can almost live on the scenery alone, on the sun, on the unutterably blue sky that roofs you between the rains. But Billy and his companion had little use for scenery, and after a week of lounging on the beach, wandering about the town and watching the natives surf bathing off Cape Huane, life began to pall on them.
They were not fools enough to drink, and if they had been, the bar of the Café Continental, white-painted, cold, correct, served by a white-coated bar tender who could talk nothing but Bêche-de-mer French, would have choked them off. There was not the ghost of a sign of a syndicate to be developed, nor of trade of any sort to be done.