The dazzled Harman weighed the rope in his hand and returned it.
“Don’t be showin’ them sort of things in bars,” said he, as the other closed the box with a hiccup and replaced it in the bag, “but now you’ve showed me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
“Pull ’em out,” said the other, picking up his hat, which he had dropped in stooping.
“They ain’t here,” said Harman, “it’s only the knowledge of them I’ve got. Stranger, ’s sure as I’m lightin’ this cigar, I know a lagoon in an island down south where you can dredge up pearls same as them by the fist full.”
“It must be a dam’ funny lagoon,” said the other, with a cynical laugh.
Harman agreed. It was the funniest place he’d ever struck, he told the story of it at length and at large, and how Mandelbaum had kicked him and Davis off the atoll and how it only wanted a few bright chaps to hire a schooner and go down and do the same to Mandelbaum and take his pearls. He assured Smart that he—Harman—was his best friend, and wrote the latitude and longitude of the pearl island down on the back of a glossy business card of the drummer’s, but it did not much matter, as he wrote it all wrong.
Then, all of a sudden, he was out of the bar and walking with Smart among palm trees. Then he was in the native village which lies at the back of the town, and they were drinking kava at the house of old Nadub, the kava seller, who was once a cannibal and boasted of the fact—kava after hopscotches!—and Smart was seated with his arm round the waist of Maiala, Nadub’s daughter, and they were both smoking the same cigar alternately and laughing. Nadub was laughing, the whole world was laughing.
Then Mr. Harman found himself home, trying to explain to Davis that he had sold the pearl location to Smart, who was going to marry Nadub’s daughter, also the beauty of true love, and the fact that he could not unlace his boots.
“A nice object you made of yourself last night,” said Davis next morning, standing by the mat bed where Harman was stretched, a jar of water beside him. “You and that two-cent drummer! What were you up to, anyway?”
Harman took a pull at the jar, put his hand under his pillow and made sure that his money was safe, and then lay back.