“Why you double damned idiot,” cried Davis, “you mean to say you’ve yanked me off in this swill tub because you’ve give forty dollars for a dud necklace, and you’re afraid of the police?—Smart—why that chap’s pearls weren’t worth forty dollars the whole bag full. Ten dollars a hundred-weight’s what the factories charge—I told you he was a dud and his stuff junk—and look at you, look at you!”
“You’ll be takin’ off your shirt next,” said Harman, “you’re talkin’ through the hole in your hat. Them pearls is genuine and if they ain’t, I’ll eat them.”
But Davis, turning over the things, had come upon something that Harman had overlooked, a teeny-weeny docket near the hasp, on which could be made out some figures—
$4.50
“Four dollars fifty,” said Davis, and Harman looked.
There was no mistaking the figures on the ticket.
“And what was it you gave for them to that girl, thinking they’d been stolen?” asked Davis.
“Damn petticuts!” cried the other, taking in everything all at once.
“Six cuts of a rope’s end it was to be,” said Davis, “but a boat stretcher will do.” He put the trash in his pocket and seized a boat stretcher that was lying on the deck, and Wayzegoose coming on deck and wiping his mouth, saw Harman bent double and meekly receiving six strokes of the birch from Davis without a murmur.
And thinking that what he saw was an optical illusion due to gin, he held off from the bottle for the rest of that cruise.