Then, suddenly, came a voice of mockery, the voice of Jim. Jim had taken little part in the discussion, leaving to abler speakers the handling of the affair, but he had made no objection to the general verdict. It was a characteristic that, whilst one with the others, he was always a bit apart; illiterate as any of them, his mind was of a different stamp.
“Lonesomeness be sugared, it’s the booze they’re thinkin’ of, sir.”
For a moment the presence of the after-guard was forgotten and voices were raised.
“You’re thinkin’ of, you mean, or why don’t you stay yourself?” enquired the man with the red handkerchief.
“And who says I won’t?” asked Jim.
That is how it happened, all of a sudden. I doubt if a moment before he had made up his mind or whether the necessity of answering back smart had done the business. At all events it was done, and Jim Kearney, long, red-headed, lantern-jawed and trailing behind him his tattered past, was enlisted the third inhabitant of the Garden of God.
Stanistreet had pointed out to Lestrange the impossibility of the schooner putting out that day: stores had to be landed, and not only landed, but brought round to the house away at the other side of the lagoon.
Lestrange did not want stores, and Jim Kearney, who was a small eater for all his size and strength, and who in these latitudes was indifferent to meat, despite his advocacy of beef as a food for children, only wanted tobacco. All the same, the captain of the Ranatonga had his own ideas on the subject. A cask of flour was broken out of the hold, the medicine chest was ransacked of pain-killer, opium and Epsom salts; needles, thread, scissors, carpenter’s tools, lines and fish-hooks—nothing was forgotten.
A shack had to be run up in the trees behind the house to hold the stores, and it was not till the morning of the third day that all was finished.
The old dinghy was overhauled and condemned, but Lestrange wished to keep it, so it was left, together with the dinghy of the Ranatonga, for practical purposes, and they were towed round by the whale boat to the sward by the house and tied up to the bank.