“I ought to have told you the diving dress was no use. Pat had got it from some old junk shop or another, and the pump was as bad, but the water being shallow it didn’t matter much, though if the thing had been in order we’d have got the job through a couple of months earlier.
IV
“We lit from that place never wanting to see an oyster again, and leaving tons of shell on the beach worth, maybe, five to six hundred dollars a ton. We didn’t want it. We laid our course for Malakā and raised it ten days later, a big brute of a copra island with Sanderson in pyjamas on the beach and a schooner loading up in the lagoon. He didn’t want Pat’s cargo, said it was four months overdue, and he had cleared the last of his copra and had enough trade to carry on with. We didn’t mind, seeing our contract was to call there out or back with no time limit specified, and we were mighty glad Pat had been done in the eye, seeing how he’d served us. There was nothing to do but cart the stuff back to ’Frisco, and dropping Malakā, we made a straight run of it, raising the Farallones in twenty-eight days and laying the old hooker off Tiburon without a spar lost or a scratch on her.
“I said to Buck: ‘What are you going to give that Chink? You promised him a suck of the orange, didn’t you?’
“‘I’m going to give him a thousand dollars,’ said Buck, ‘when I’ve cashed the pearls and settled with Pat. I’m a man of my word, and there’s no luck in breaking a promise.’
“I was with him there.
“We landed with the stuff in a handkerchief and made straight for Patrick O’Brien’s business office. We’d cleaned ourselves a bit, but we still looked pretty much scarecrows, but when we’d shown that handkerchief of pearls to the old man he didn’t bother about our looks.
“I told him how, through my bad navigation, we’d missed the island at first, and then struck it by chance.
“‘Well,’ says Pat, ‘you’re the only men in ’Frisco that’s ever got the better of a Chink so far as to get something out of him for nothing, for twenty dollars is nothing against that hatful of pearls. The schooner is yours, Buck, and from what I hear of the cargo you can dump it in the harbour or sell it for junk.’
“Then when we’d cleaned ourselves and got some decent clothes, he took us off to the Palatial and gave us a big dinner. Now that chap was the meanest guy in small things you could find in California, yet he’d lost a cargo and a schooner and instead of cutting up rough he seemed to enjoy it. Buck being his nephew, I suppose he was proud of being done by him and seeing him successful.