“I’ve told you how me and Slane pulled off that pearling job, but I never told you what we did with the money. Most chaps would have bust it, we just stuck it in the bank and, after a run to the Yosemite, back we come to ’Frisco on the look out for more larks. We weren’t set on money for the sake of money so much as for the fun of getting it, for I tell you as a mortal truth there’s no hunting to beat the hunting of a dollar, more especial when you’ve got a herd of twenty or thirty thousand of them with their tails up and you after them. We’d had enough of pearling, we had no taste for blackbirding and we were turning copra over in our minds when, sitting having our luncheon one day in Martin’s restaurant, a slab-sided Yank, six foot and over and thin as a Jackstaff, comes along up to us.
“‘You’re Mr. Slane?’ says he.
“‘That’s me,’ says Buck.
“‘I’ve heard tell of you,’ says the chap, ‘and I’ve got a double-barrelled proposition to put before you. May I take a seat at your table? Scudder’s my name, and Martin will tell you I’m a straight man.’
“Down he sits. We’d finished feeding and so had he; the place was pretty empty and no one by to hear, and he begins.
“‘First barrel of the prop,’ he says, ‘is a dodge for killing fish. You know how they fish out in the Islands? Well, they do a good deal of spearin’ and hookin’ and sometimes they poison the fish pools with soap, but the king way is dynamite.’ He pulls a stick of something out of his pocket and goes on. ‘Here’s a stick of dynamite. You can fire it by electricity or you can shove a match on one end and light it and throw the durned thing into the water. It goes bang and a minute after every fish in that vicinity come to the surface stunned dead. That’s so, but the bother is the stuff goes off sometimes premature and the Kanakas are always losing hands and legs and things, which don’t make for its popularity. Being out there last year at Taleka Island I set my invention trap working to hit a device. I’ve always took notice that a man who fills a want fills his pockets, and a patent safety explosive fish killer is a want with a capital “W” right from ’Frisco to Guam. Well, here it is,’ he says, and out of his other pocket he takes the great-grandfather of a Mills bomb, same as the Allies have been pasting the Germans with. It wasn’t bigger than a tangerine orange and rough made, but it had all the essentials. You didn’t pull a pin out, it was just two caps of metal screwed together. The thing was dead as mutton when it was lightly screwed, but screwed tight it exposed its horns and was live as Satan. Just one turn of the wrist tightened it up and then if you flung it against anything, even water, it would go bang. It was a working model, and he showed us the whole thing and the cost of manufacture. His factory was a back bedroom in Polk Street, but he reckoned with a shed and a lathe and a couple of Chink artisans to help he could turn out fifty Scudder Fish Crackers—that’s the name he gave them—a day. He said the Bassingtons had a share in the patent and would give him the material for nothing so as to have the thing tried out. He wanted five hundred dollars to start his factory, then he wanted us to give him an order for two thousand crackers at fifty cents each.
“‘You don’t want no more cargo than that,’ said he, ‘once the Kanakas get the hang of this thing they’ll trade you their back teeth for them; you see it’s new. It’s like millinery. If I could invent a new sort of hat and start a store in Market Street every woman from here to St. Jo would be on it in a cluster. You could scrape them off with a spoon. Kanakas are just the same as women, for two thousand of them crackers you can fill up to your hatches in copra.
“‘Well, now,’ he goes on, ‘on top of that I’ll make you a present of three thousand dollars, if you’ll take the proposition up. Sru, the chief chap at Taleka, wants Winchester rifles and ammunition and he’s got the money in gold coin to pay for them. He wants six thousand dollars’ worth and I can get the lot from Bassingtons for three thousand dollars, boxed and laded on board your ship. The crackers won’t take no room for stowage and the guns and cartridges won’t eat half your cargo space, so you can take some cheap trade goods that’ll give you a deck cargo of turtle shell and bêche de mer. Get me? You make money on the crackers, you make money on the guns and you make a bit out of the shell. It’s a golden goose layin’ eggs at both ends and the middle, and I’ll give you a writing promising to pay the five hundred dollars for the factory in one year with twenty per cent, for the loan.’
“I could see Slane was sniffing at it so I didn’t interfere, and the upshot was we made an appointment with Scudder to meet us next day and take a boat out in the harbour to test a couple of his crackers. We did, and he was no liar, the things went off like guns and dead fish were still coming up when a police boat nailed us and rushed us ashore and we had to pay ten dollars fine for illegal behaviour. That’s what the Yanks called it—anyhow the dead fish settled the business and Slane took up the proposition and put his hand in his pocket and fetched out the money to start the factory and gave Scudder his order for two thousand crackers.
“Slane hadn’t disposed of the Greyhound. We ran her into dock and had the barnacles scraped off her, gave her some new spars and a new mainsail and finished up with a lick of paint. It took six weeks and by that time Scudder had finished his job and had the crackers ready boxed and all and the Bassington company were waiting to deliver the Winchesters and ammunition. We took the old hooker over to Long Wharf for the stowing and the stuff came down in boxes marked eggs and crockery ware.