They visited the roulette shop, where the keeper of the table allowed them to win some forty dollars which they promptly departed with, never to return.
“We’ve skinned the cream off that,” said Davis next morning as they lay smoking and kicking their heels on the sand, “and there’s not another pan of milk about. You see, we’re handicapped not talking French. Like cats in a larder with muzzles on—that’s about the size of it.”
Harman assented. He took from his pocket the bag that held his money, nearly a hundred bright brass-yellow Australian sovereigns. They were on a secluded part of the beach with no one within eye-shot, and he amused himself by counting the coins and stacking them in little piles on the sand.
Then he swept the coins back into the bag and sat up as Davis pointed seaward to where, rounding Cape Huane, came a white-painted steamer, the mail boat for Papeete and beyond.
The whoop of her siren lashed the sleepy air and brought echoes from the woods and a quarter of a minute later a far-off whoop from the echoes in the hills, then down from the town and groves the beach began to stream with people. Kanaka children racing for the sea edge and fruit sellers with their baskets, girls fluttering foulard to the breeze and Kanaka bucks, naked but for a loin-cloth; then came white folk, Aaronson, the Jew, and the keeper of the Hôtel Continental, officials and a stray Chinaman or two.
Neither Bud nor Billy stirred a limb till the rasp of the anchor chain came over the water, then getting up, they strolled down to the water’s edge and stood, hands in pockets, watching the shore boats putting out, boats laden with fruit, and canoes with naked Kanaka children ready to dive for coppers.
Then the ship’s boat came ashore with mails and passengers.
“Ain’t much sign of a syndicate here, neither,” said Harman, as he stood criticising the latter, mostly male tourists of the heavy globe-trotting type and American women with blue veils and guide books. “It’s the old mail-boat crowd that’s been savin’ up for a holiday for the last seven year an’s got so in the habit of savin’, it’s forgot how to spend. I know them. Been on a mail boat once; haven’t you ever been on a mail boat, Bud? Then you don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. Half the crew is stewards and half the officers is dancin’ masters to judge by the side of them, and the blessed cargo is duds like them things landin’ now.”
He turned on his heel and led the way back towards the town.
As they drew along towards it, one of the passengers, a young, smart and natty individual carrying an imitation crocodile-skin handbag, overtook them, and Harman, greatly exercised in his mind by the bag, struck up a conversation.