“We’d come to the conclusion that ’Frisco was a bit too crowded for us, and we fixed to try for the Islands. Those days there was money out there. Why, in those days the guano deposits hadn’t been spotted on Sophia Island, and there it was lying, a fortune shouting to be took; copra was beginning to bud, and blackbirding was having the time of its life; China was eating all the sharks’ fins and bêche de mer she could stuff, and then you had the shell lagoons, shell and pearl. ’Frisco was crazy over them, and we heard yarns of chaps turned millionaires in a night by striking an atoll and ripping the floor out. They were true yarns. In those days the Admiralty charts and the Pacific Directory were years behind the times, and there were islands being struck time and again that had never been heard of before.
“We tried round the wharves for a likely ship, but from Long Wharf to Meiggs’ there was nothing but grain carriers cleaning their bilges and Oregon timber schooners unloading pine.
“One day, Buck, who’d been out up town by himself, came home halooing. ‘Mate,’ says he, ‘our fortunes are made.’ Then he gave his yarn. He’d been poking round by China Town when, coming along a street—Alta Street it was—he saw a bunch of Chinks at a corner, two young chaps and an old father Abraham of a Chink with horn spectacles on him. They were standing on the loaf when Buck sighted them, talking, and then they began quarrelling, and the two young chaps set on father Abraham and began pulling him about and kicking him, till Buck sent them flying and rescued the old chap, who was near done in. Then he helped him home. Fong Yen was his name, and he had a little hole of a bird shop just inside China Town by a Chow restaurant. He was real bad, knocked about by those brutes, and full of gratitude; he offered Buck his pick of the birds, but Buck was no bird fancier. Then says Fong: ‘I’ll give you something better than birds,’ and he goes to a drawer in a lacquer box and hunts about and finds a bit of paper. ‘It was given me by my son,’ says he, ‘to keep. He was killed in the riots down at the docks last month; you have been as good as a son to me, take it, it’s a fortune.’ Then he explained. It was the latitude and longitude of a virgin shell island written down by his son who’d been a sailor on one of the Chinese bêche de mer boats. The boat was wrecked and all hands lost with the exception of this chap, who had kept the secret and had been saving up money to go and skin the island when he was killed. Poor old Fong couldn’t work the thing himself; he had no relations, and to give or sell that paper to any of the China Town lot would simply be getting his throat cut, maybe, to keep his head shut on the matter and get the purchase money back. He was quite straight with Buck on this, and told him he was giving him something that was no use to himself now his son was dead, but if Buck chose to give him a few dollars to buy opium with, he wouldn’t be above taking it. Buck takes out his roll and peels off two ten-dollar bills and promises him a pull out of the profits.
“Buck showed me the paper. There was nothing on it but the latitude and longitude of the place and a spot that looked to me like a blood mark. We got hold of a chart from a ship master we’d chummed in with and found the position north-east of Clermont Tonnerre in the Low Archipelago. I said to Buck, ‘It’s all very well—but how are we going to get there? It’s about as much use to us as to the Chink. S’pose we pull some guy in to put up the dollars for a ship, do you think he won’t want the profits? If I know anything of ’Frisco, he’ll want our skins as well. That old Chink was on the right side of the fence, he knew ’Frisco and knew he hadn’t a dog’s chance of getting a cent out of it.’ Buck hears me out, then he says, ‘Do you suppose,’ he says, ‘that when I paid out good money for this thing I had no idea how to work it, do you suppose I have no man to back me?’
“‘Who’s your man?’ says I.
“‘My uncle,’ says he.
“I’d clean forgot the rich uncle. Then I began to see that Buck wasn’t such a fool as I thought him. I knew the way the Irish stick together, and old Pat O’Brien being one of the biggest bugs in the town I began to see the light, as the parsons say, and Buck asking me to go with him that night and lay for the old chap, I agreed.
II
“Pat lived on Nobs Hill, and we fixed nine o’clock as the time to call on him, reckoning he’d be in then and maybe in a good humour after his dinner. We easy found the place, for everyone knew Pat, but the size of it put us off, till Buck took courage at last and pushed the bell.
“A darkie in a white shirt front opened and showed us across a big hall into a room all hung with pictures, and there we sat shuffling our feet till the door opened again and in come Pat, a little old, bald-headed chap in slippers with the butt of a cigar stuck up in the corner of his mouth, more like Mr. Jiggs in the comic papers than anyone else I’ve seen.