Wayzegoose, having got his ship out, went down below for a drink, leaving the deck to the Kanaka bo’sun and the fellow at the wheel, and finding themselves practically alone, Harman lifted up his voice and chortled.
“I’ll tell you now,” he said, “I’ll tell you, now we’re out—that chap was robbed by the Kanakas. You remember sayin’ that he was shoutin’ he was robbed as they was frog-marchin’ him to the ship—he spoke the truth.”
“Did you rob him, then?” asked Davis suspiciously.
“Now I’ll tell you. Him and me was sittin’ drinkin’ at that bar most of the afternoon when out he pulls pearls from that bag of his, pearls maybe worth thirty thousand dollars.”
“Where the blazes did he get them from?” asked Davis.
“Out of that bag, I’m tellin’ you, and right in front of the Kanaka bar-tender. ‘Put them things away,’ I says, ‘and don’t be showin’ them in bars,’ but not he, he was too full of Bourbon and buck to listen and then when I left him after, in the native town, they must have robbed him. For,” said Mr. Harman, “between you and me and the mizzen mast, them pearls are in my pocket now.
“No, sir, I didn’t pinch them, but that piece Maiala did, as sure as Moses wasn’t Aaron, for this morning I met her carryin’ stuff for old Nadub to make his drinks with and there round her neck was the pearls. Stole.
“I follows her home and with sign langwidge and showin’ the dollars, I made them hand over them pearls, forty dollars I paid for twenty thousand dollars worth of stuff and what do you think of that?”
Billy put his hand in his pocket and produced a handkerchief carefully knotted, and from the handkerchief, a gorgeous pearl necklace.
Davis looked at it, took it in his hands and looked at it again.